All about the mixed-source company

Sam Varghese
Monday, 08 January 2007 04:28

Opinion and Analysis

One of the classic quotes to emerge from of the tech industry in recent times has come from Maarten Koster, the newly-appointed president of Novell Asia-Pacific.

 

Just as a momentous year was drawing to a close, Koster, in an interview with ZDNet, described Novell as a "mixed-source" company. Not a commercial or license-based company - Koster used Microsoft as an example of that breed. Not an open source company - no, Red Hat was that kind of beast, said Koster.

Novell, on the other hand, sold Linux as some kind of "base building block", together "with identity and resource management products that manage a hotchpotch of proprietary and open source software within an IT infrastructure." That's a quote from the article.

Such characterisations, to me, are part of the identity crisis in which Novell has found itself ever since it decided to buy SuSE Linux and enter the business of reselling that product. It's not mixed-source by any stretch of the imagination as it never had any open source products in its ranks ever. No, it just bought an off-the-shelf product and then started reselling it.

For a while, Novell toyed with the idea of actually getting closer to promoting itself as a GNU/Linux company. A distribution, Novell Linux Desktop, a fairly polished effort based somewhat on SuSE, was put out - at least some journalists got a copy for review - and there was talk that while SuSE would continue to cater to its existing users, NLD would become the flagship business GNU/Linux product. SuSE, we must remember, is an European company and its roots do not really suit it when it comes to trying to compete where Novell wants to concentrate - the US of A.

But then Novell had no choice once it decided to buy a GNU/Linux company - Red Hat wasn't for sale and probably never will be. GNU/Linux was seen as a good investment and Novell wanted a going concern. So SuSE it was and a bad fit at that. Novell tried to take the biggest selling European distribution under its wings and fight a marketshare battle in the American market.