03.09.07
Posted in Deals, Finance, Novell, Oracle at 11:56 am by Shane Coyle
Head over to Once More Unto the Breach and download/peruse the PDF file of Brent Williams’ presentation on Open Source in business, including an analysis of both the Microvell deal and Oracle’s Linux offering.
Brent Williams presented “Open Source Business Models: A Wall Street Look at a Wild 2006 and the Prospects for Even More Fun in 2007” at EclipseCon Tuesday. Brent is a (temporarily) independent equity research analyst. Unlike so many “Wall Street” types, he approaches the discussion from the economics of what people do, rather than what they say they do. Similar to r0ml in content, there are always surprises along the along the way.
The first 15-20 pages are the Novell and Oracle analyses, they are succinct and do a great job of pointing out how each company is ‘solving the wrong problem’. A great point in page 13 is how $73M of Novell’s $91M Linux subscription invoicing was from previous multi-year deals, seemingly belying Hovsepian’s claims that the deal was helping Novell gain new customers.
Stephen Walli said it’s “The Best Presentation on Software Business and Open Source I’ve Ever Seen”, I think I am in total agreement – an excellent presentation, and thanks to Stephen (and Brent Williams obviously) for sharing.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, OpenSUSE, Review, Ubuntu at 2:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Opensuse is a fine Linux distribution. I can say this as a long-time SuSE user. However, increasingly it is faced with challenges posed by other vendors which — at least to some of us — are presently perceived as less harmful to the broader community. They thrive in a more positive and friendly image, regardless of how much they actually contribute to the Linux mainline (new or existing packages).
The scale of companies plays a role as well. While long-term sustainability is an important factor, some people refuse to trust companies which project vanity and/or take control of a distribution’s direction (e.g. community- versus customer-driven). Compiz is a fine example of this.
Novell is clearly listening. In fact, it has just kicked off a survey for openSUSE users. But what happens when those who contribute to openSUSE (as I used to do) feel as though they were backstabbed and also portrayed negatively? It’s a blame game which involves OpenSUSE developers/testers/assistants/documentation volunteers, some of whom frown upon actions taken by the management of Novell.
While we don’t take pleasure in seeing Opensuse sinking in reviews while Ubuntu trumps many of its rivals, it does make you think. Ubuntu becomes the codebase of many other Linux distributions. Here is yet another reminder that Opensuse needs to get its act together fast. It is no longer the distribution of choice, which is a status it could probably boast a couple of years ago.
(K)Ubuntu to OpenSuSe – My Experience
Installing softwares. YAST is not easy to use if you are used to apt-get or synaptic. With Ubuntu, you’ll have the basic repos
added and you can just uncomment other repos in the sources.list file if you want to use them. When I opened the list in YAST, there was nothing there.
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