Mixed Signals -- Novell Takes Open Source and Proprietary Routes

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2007-05-25 02:52:47 UTC
Modified: 2007-05-25 02:53:38 UTC

Liferay has just joined Novell's equivalent of Red Hat Exchange, following another recent inclusion. This comes amid more reports on expected acquisitions, which as we have mentioned before, are likely to involve proprietary software. These different development show that Novell continues to cling onto its proprietary software roots rather than truly advance into future business and development models.

Elsewhere in the news we see NetWare losing its appeal. In Australia, for instance, NetWare is being replaced by GNU/Linux.

As part of a core infrastructure refresh project, The NSW Department of State and Regional Development (DSRD) will ditch its legacy NetWare systems in favour of the open source Linux.

There is further confirmation in ComputerWorld, which yesterday described NetWare as a dead/dying skill.

8. Certified NetWare Engineers

In the early 1990s, it was all the rage to become a Certified NetWare Engineer, especially with Novell Inc. enjoying 90% market share for PC-based servers. Today, however, you don't have to look far to find CNEs retraining themselves with other skills to stay marketable. "It seems like it happened overnight," Hayes says. "Everyone had Novell, and within a two-year period, they'd all switched to NT." Novell says it will continue supporting NetWare 6.5 through at least 2015; however, it has also retired several of its NetWare certifications, including Master CNE and NetWare 5 CNE, and it plans to retire NetWare 6 CNE. "Companies are still paying skill premiums for CNEs, but they're losing value," Foote says.

Comments

Ian

2007-05-25 03:19:25

Granted, it's a dead end NOS, but most of the CNE courses went beyond just straight NetWare. The courses went heavy into eDirectory design, and various applications which ran on NetWare. Many of those apps and eDirectory all run on Linux, so the knowledge is relevent.

I mean, how much do NetWare admins actually dig into the OS itself? Maybe if you're nutty about oplocks or memory settings, but even those are out of the CNE course scope.

Personally, I expect next summer to be the time where I finally start to move my NetWare boxes towards Linux. I have a bunch of SLES boxes, but they're used for webmail, our website, our wiki, and I'm building network monitoring server.

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Mixed Signals -- Novell Takes Open Source and Proprietary Routes

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