Net Results: It's certainly been a fascinating couple of weeksfor Linux. First, there was Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison'ssurprise announcement that he would be grinding Red Hat Linux underhis heel - oops! I mean going head to head with Red Hat by offeringits own version of Red Hat Linux free of charge and offering supportat half the price Red Hat does.
Shortly thereafter, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer wasboisterously shaking hands with Novell chief executive RonHovsepian, as they sealed a deal to offer interoperability withNovell's SUSE distribution of Linux, all in the name of customerpeace, love and understanding.
Linux fans may view the new Linux landscape as a sure sign of theadoption and continuing growth of the markets for their favouriteopen source system. But the rapid shifts are also a sign of a newmaturity in how the mainstream software companies see Linux OS andindicate that there's a tussle for who controls the growth andexpansion of this market - and that means the larger companies likeOracle, IBM, Novell and Microsoft, not the small vendors like RedHat.
Red Hat, which has had an admirable 42 per cent growth in 2006 inrevenue and a 75 per cent growth in profits, has become a smallscale but potentially significant threat to companies likeMicrosoft.
And, for that matter, a threat to Oracle. While Oracle had been alongtime partner for Red Hat - the latter having about 60 per centof the Linux server market - naughty Red Hat showed ambitions aboveits station and went and bought JBoss. JBoss makes an open sourceJava application server - which means Red Hat could start to offerits own "stack" or operating system plus integrated applications,and compete directly with Oracle on its own ground, rather than RedHat acting as a convenient "third world supplier of raw materials",as Information Week's Charles Babcock has it.
Despite the healthy figures for Red Hat, a lot of people feel thecompany's growth has been too slow, which means the growth of theLinux market has been too slow.
Ellison rattled off a set of reasons during his keynote two weeksago at Oracle OpenWorld, citing uncertainties about code ownership(a small company, SCO, has claimed it owns some of the codecurrently in Linux and therefore, everyone using it owes themlicence fees) and the availability of enterprise-level support foran operating system that doesn't belong to anybody directly and wascreated, and continues to be maintained, by an amorphous group ofdevelopers around the world.
And then there are the bugs. The question of bug fixes "is themost serious problem confronting the Linux community today. It'sslowing the adoption of Linux," Ellison said.
So the number two software company in the world decided it wouldtake Red Hat Linux, strip out all the copyright elements, add inregular bug fixes, recompile the code and let anyone download itfrom its website.
Red Hat shares plunged 24 per cent the day after Ellison's speechand you wonder if the little company will keep on going. Probablynot by only offering a distribution of Linux plus support, itscurrent game plan - it will need to compete by venturing furtherinto the acquisitions area and offering a bigger picture of opensource offerings.
On the other hand, Oracle's cunning plan has inadvertentlycrowned the Red Hat distribution as the de facto king in its marketand many customers may wish to stay with the home team rather thanmoving to a database-plus company for its Linux.
And what about the Novell-Microsoft love-in? That deal alsocaught many by surprise given that the two have been busy suing eachother over copyright issues. Salt Lake City-based Novell has been anunderdog, struggling to find a new role for itself as an open sourceoriented company though its purchase of SUSE Linux - which trailsRed Hat with about 10 per cent of the enterprise server market. ButNovell is showing some modest, promising revenue growth.
Indeed that may very well be what makes Novell, and Novell'sversion of Linux, attractive to Microsoft. As analysts have noted,SUSE tends to run on a lot of mainframes, and mainframes don'tinterest Microsoft. And SUSE is a small competitor in the enterpriseserver market. Whereas Red Hat is a direct Microsoft competitor, andgrowing. So it suits Steve to put the brakes on Red Hat through itsdeal with Novell, and it suits Microsoft to choose the lesser of theLinux evils if its customers, darn them, are going to insist onrunning Linux as well as Windows in their corporate environments, asthey increasingly do. And it suits Novell to get a big partner tohelp spread SUSE in the enterprise space, to get a couple of nicepay-offs from Microsoft, and have its position in the marketstabilise. Many expect the current lawsuits to disappear quietly aswell.
I asked Tom Francese, Novell executive president for worldwidesales, why Novell was making this move now, and he replied, "Whynot? This is an unprecedented announcement and I think we're in anunprecedented time. And this announcement is based around the notionthat the customer comes first, and is more market-driven thenanything."
In a slantwise reference to the copyright lawsuits withMicrosoft, Francese notes that the market wants "to get the cloud inthe marketplace removed". Both companies are pushinginteroperability: Microsoft because it has to join what it cannotbeat, but join in its own way and its own time; Novell because itknows customers want to run both operating systems and it cannotsimply take on the Windows juggernaut. Hence it will give Microsoftcoupons that it can hand out to its customers to get SUSE Linuxsupport, which means Microsoft customers can be assured ofenterprise level Linux support.
Francese notes, however, that Novell is "a desktop to data centreoffering with the same code" and that Novell will continue tocompete vigorously with Microsoft on other fronts.
For those of us who find this clash and consolidation between themainstream tech titans and grassroots open source companiesfascinating, the past month has been an affirmation that we ain'tseen nothing yet as the Linux market goes ever more mainstream.
It's as if the Greens were talking coalition government with thePDs. I can't wait to see what happens next.
Grassroots open source inches into the mainstreamNet Results: It's certainly been a fascinating couple of weeksfor Linux. First, there was Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison'ssurprise announcement that he would be grinding Red Hat Linux underhis heel - oops! I mean going head to head with Red Hat by offeringits own version of Red Hat Linux free of charge and offering supportat half the price Red Hat does.
Shortly thereafter, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer wasboisterously shaking hands with Novell chief executive RonHovsepian, as they sealed a deal to offer interoperability withNovell's SUSE distribution of Linux, all in the name of customerpeace, love and understanding.
Linux fans may view the new Linux landscape as a sure sign of theadoption and continuing growth of the markets for their favouriteopen source system. But the rapid shifts are also a sign of a newmaturity in how the mainstream software companies see Linux OS andindicate that there's a tussle for who controls the growth andexpansion of this market - and that means the larger companies likeOracle, IBM, Novell and Microsoft, not the small vendors like RedHat.
Red Hat, which has had an admirable 42 per cent growth in 2006 inrevenue and a 75 per cent growth in profits, has become a smallscale but potentially significant threat to companies likeMicrosoft.
And, for that matter, a threat to Oracle. While Oracle had been alongtime partner for Red Hat - the latter having about 60 per centof the Linux server market - naughty Red Hat showed ambitions aboveits station and went and bought JBoss. JBoss makes an open sourceJava application server - which means Red Hat could start to offerits own "stack" or operating system plus integrated applications,and compete directly with Oracle on its own ground, rather than RedHat acting as a convenient "third world supplier of raw materials",as Information Week's Charles Babcock has it.
Despite the healthy figures for Red Hat, a lot of people feel thecompany's growth has been too slow, which means the growth of theLinux market has been too slow.
Ellison rattled off a set of reasons during his keynote two weeksago at Oracle OpenWorld, citing uncertainties about code ownership(a small company, SCO, has claimed it owns some of the codecurrently in Linux and therefore, everyone using it owes themlicence fees) and the availability of enterprise-level support foran operating system that doesn't belong to anybody directly and wascreated, and continues to be maintained, by an amorphous group ofdevelopers around the world.
And then there are the bugs. The question of bug fixes "is themost serious problem confronting the Linux community today. It'sslowing the adoption of Linux," Ellison said.
So the number two software company in the world decided it wouldtake Red Hat Linux, strip out all the copyright elements, add inregular bug fixes, recompile the code and let anyone download itfrom its website.
Red Hat shares plunged 24 per cent the day after Ellison's speechand you wonder if the little company will keep on going. Probablynot by only offering a distribution of Linux plus support, itscurrent game plan - it will need to compete by venturing furtherinto the acquisitions area and offering a bigger picture of opensource offerings.
On the other hand, Oracle's cunning plan has inadvertentlycrowned the Red Hat distribution as the de facto king in its marketand many customers may wish to stay with the home team rather thanmoving to a database-plus company for its Linux.
And what about the Novell-Microsoft love-in? That deal alsocaught many by surprise given that the two have been busy suing eachother over copyright issues. Salt Lake City-based Novell has been anunderdog, struggling to find a new role for itself as an open sourceoriented company though its purchase of SUSE Linux - which trailsRed Hat with about 10 per cent of the enterprise server market. ButNovell is showing some modest, promising revenue growth.
Indeed that may very well be what makes Novell, and Novell'sversion of Linux, attractive to Microsoft. As analysts have noted,SUSE tends to run on a lot of mainframes, and mainframes don'tinterest Microsoft. And SUSE is a small competitor in the enterpriseserver market. Whereas Red Hat is a direct Microsoft competitor, andgrowing. So it suits Steve to put the brakes on Red Hat through itsdeal with Novell, and it suits Microsoft to choose the lesser of theLinux evils if its customers, darn them, are going to insist onrunning Linux as well as Windows in their corporate environments, asthey increasingly do. And it suits Novell to get a big partner tohelp spread SUSE in the enterprise space, to get a couple of nicepay-offs from Microsoft, and have its position in the marketstabilise. Many expect the current lawsuits to disappear quietly aswell.
I asked Tom Francese, Novell executive president for worldwidesales, why Novell was making this move now, and he replied, "Whynot? This is an unprecedented announcement and I think we're in anunprecedented time. And this announcement is based around the notionthat the customer comes first, and is more market-driven thenanything."
In a slantwise reference to the copyright lawsuits withMicrosoft, Francese notes that the market wants "to get the cloud inthe marketplace removed". Both companies are pushinginteroperability: Microsoft because it has to join what it cannotbeat, but join in its own way and its own time; Novell because itknows customers want to run both operating systems and it cannotsimply take on the Windows juggernaut. Hence it will give Microsoftcoupons that it can hand out to its customers to get SUSE Linuxsupport, which means Microsoft customers can be assured ofenterprise level Linux support.
Francese notes, however, that Novell is "a desktop to data centreoffering with the same code" and that Novell will continue tocompete vigorously with Microsoft on other fronts.
For those of us who find this clash and consolidation between themainstream tech titans and grassroots open source companiesfascinating, the past month has been an affirmation that we ain'tseen nothing yet as the Linux market goes ever more mainstream.
It's as if the Greens were talking coalition government with thePDs. I can't wait to see what happens next.
Grassroots open source inches into the mainstreamNet Results: It's certainly been a fascinating couple of weeksfor Linux. First, there was Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison'ssurprise announcement that he would be grinding Red Hat Linux underhis heel - oops! I mean going head to head with Red Hat by offeringits own version of Red Hat Linux free of charge and offering supportat half the price Red Hat does.
Shortly thereafter, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer wasboisterously shaking hands with Novell chief executive RonHovsepian, as they sealed a deal to offer interoperability withNovell's SUSE distribution of Linux, all in the name of customerpeace, love and understanding.
Linux fans may view the new Linux landscape as a sure sign of theadoption and continuing growth of the markets for their favouriteopen source system. But the rapid shifts are also a sign of a newmaturity in how the mainstream software companies see Linux OS andindicate that there's a tussle for who controls the growth andexpansion of this market - and that means the larger companies likeOracle, IBM, Novell and Microsoft, not the small vendors like RedHat.
Red Hat, which has had an admirable 42 per cent growth in 2006 inrevenue and a 75 per cent growth in profits, has become a smallscale but potentially significant threat to companies likeMicrosoft.
And, for that matter, a threat to Oracle. While Oracle had been alongtime partner for Red Hat - the latter having about 60 per centof the Linux server market - naughty Red Hat showed ambitions aboveits station and went and bought JBoss. JBoss makes an open sourceJava application server - which means Red Hat could start to offerits own "stack" or operating system plus integrated applications,and compete directly with Oracle on its own ground, rather than RedHat acting as a convenient "third world supplier of raw materials",as Information Week's Charles Babcock has it.
Despite the healthy figures for Red Hat, a lot of people feel thecompany's growth has been too slow, which means the growth of theLinux market has been too slow.
Ellison rattled off a set of reasons during his keynote two weeksago at Oracle OpenWorld, citing uncertainties about code ownership(a small company, SCO, has claimed it owns some of the codecurrently in Linux and therefore, everyone using it owes themlicence fees) and the availability of enterprise-level support foran operating system that doesn't belong to anybody directly and wascreated, and continues to be maintained, by an amorphous group ofdevelopers around the world.
And then there are the bugs. The question of bug fixes "is themost serious problem confronting the Linux community today. It'sslowing the adoption of Linux," Ellison said.
So the number two software company in the world decided it wouldtake Red Hat Linux, strip out all the copyright elements, add inregular bug fixes, recompile the code and let anyone download itfrom its website.
Red Hat shares plunged 24 per cent the day after Ellison's speechand you wonder if the little company will keep on going. Probablynot by only offering a distribution of Linux plus support, itscurrent game plan - it will need to compete by venturing furtherinto the acquisitions area and offering a bigger picture of opensource offerings.
On the other hand, Oracle's cunning plan has inadvertentlycrowned the Red Hat distribution as the de facto king in its marketand many customers may wish to stay with the home team rather thanmoving to a database-plus company for its Linux.
And what about the Novell-Microsoft love-in? That deal alsocaught many by surprise given that the two have been busy suing eachother over copyright issues. Salt Lake City-based Novell has been anunderdog, struggling to find a new role for itself as an open sourceoriented company though its purchase of SUSE Linux - which trailsRed Hat with about 10 per cent of the enterprise server market. ButNovell is showing some modest, promising revenue growth.
Indeed that may very well be what makes Novell, and Novell'sversion of Linux, attractive to Microsoft. As analysts have noted,SUSE tends to run on a lot of mainframes, and mainframes don'tinterest Microsoft. And SUSE is a small competitor in the enterpriseserver market. Whereas Red Hat is a direct Microsoft competitor, andgrowing. So it suits Steve to put the brakes on Red Hat through itsdeal with Novell, and it suits Microsoft to choose the lesser of theLinux evils if its customers, darn them, are going to insist onrunning Linux as well as Windows in their corporate environments, asthey increasingly do. And it suits Novell to get a big partner tohelp spread SUSE in the enterprise space, to get a couple of nicepay-offs from Microsoft, and have its position in the marketstabilise. Many expect the current lawsuits to disappear quietly aswell.
I asked Tom Francese, Novell executive president for worldwidesales, why Novell was making this move now, and he replied, "Whynot? This is an unprecedented announcement and I think we're in anunprecedented time. And this announcement is based around the notionthat the customer comes first, and is more market-driven thenanything."
In a slantwise reference to the copyright lawsuits withMicrosoft, Francese notes that the market wants "to get the cloud inthe marketplace removed". Both companies are pushinginteroperability: Microsoft because it has to join what it cannotbeat, but join in its own way and its own time; Novell because itknows customers want to run both operating systems and it cannotsimply take on the Windows juggernaut. Hence it will give Microsoftcoupons that it can hand out to its customers to get SUSE Linuxsupport, which means Microsoft customers can be assured ofenterprise level Linux support.
Francese notes, however, that Novell is "a desktop to data centreoffering with the same code" and that Novell will continue tocompete vigorously with Microsoft on other fronts.
For those of us who find this clash and consolidation between themainstream tech titans and grassroots open source companiesfascinating, the past month has been an affirmation that we ain'tseen nothing yet as the Linux market goes ever more mainstream.
It's as if the Greens were talking coalition government with thePDs. I can't wait to see what happens next.
Grassroots open source inches into the mainstreamNet Results: It's certainly been a fascinating couple of weeksfor Linux. First, there was Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison'ssurprise announcement that he would be grinding Red Hat Linux underhis heel - oops! I mean going head to head with Red Hat by offeringits own version of Red Hat Linux free of charge and offering supportat half the price Red Hat does.
Shortly thereafter, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer wasboisterously shaking hands with Novell chief executive RonHovsepian, as they sealed a deal to offer interoperability withNovell's SUSE distribution of Linux, all in the name of customerpeace, love and understanding.
Linux fans may view the new Linux landscape as a sure sign of theadoption and continuing growth of the markets for their favouriteopen source system. But the rapid shifts are also a sign of a newmaturity in how the mainstream software companies see Linux OS andindicate that there's a tussle for who controls the growth andexpansion of this market - and that means the larger companies likeOracle, IBM, Novell and Microsoft, not the small vendors like RedHat.
Red Hat, which has had an admirable 42 per cent growth in 2006 inrevenue and a 75 per cent growth in profits, has become a smallscale but potentially significant threat to companies likeMicrosoft.
And, for that matter, a threat to Oracle. While Oracle had been alongtime partner for Red Hat - the latter having about 60 per centof the Linux server market - naughty Red Hat showed ambitions aboveits station and went and bought JBoss. JBoss makes an open sourceJava application server - which means Red Hat could start to offerits own "stack" or operating system plus integrated applications,and compete directly with Oracle on its own ground, rather than RedHat acting as a convenient "third world supplier of raw materials",as Information Week's Charles Babcock has it.
Despite the healthy figures for Red Hat, a lot of people feel thecompany's growth has been too slow, which means the growth of theLinux market has been too slow.
Ellison rattled off a set of reasons during his keynote two weeksago at Oracle OpenWorld, citing uncertainties about code ownership(a small company, SCO, has claimed it owns some of the codecurrently in Linux and therefore, everyone using it owes themlicence fees) and the availability of enterprise-level support foran operating system that doesn't belong to anybody directly and wascreated, and continues to be maintained, by an amorphous group ofdevelopers around the world.
And then there are the bugs. The question of bug fixes "is themost serious problem confronting the Linux community today. It'sslowing the adoption of Linux," Ellison said.
So the number two software company in the world decided it wouldtake Red Hat Linux, strip out all the copyright elements, add inregular bug fixes, recompile the code and let anyone download itfrom its website.
Red Hat shares plunged 24 per cent the day after Ellison's speechand you wonder if the little company will keep on going. Probablynot by only offering a distribution of Linux plus support, itscurrent game plan - it will need to compete by venturing furtherinto the acquisitions area and offering a bigger picture of opensource offerings.
On the other hand, Oracle's cunning plan has inadvertentlycrowned the Red Hat distribution as the de facto king in its marketand many customers may wish to stay with the home team rather thanmoving to a database-plus company for its Linux.
And what about the Novell-Microsoft love-in? That deal alsocaught many by surprise given that the two have been busy suing eachother over copyright issues. Salt Lake City-based Novell has been anunderdog, struggling to find a new role for itself as an open sourceoriented company though its purchase of SUSE Linux - which trailsRed Hat with about 10 per cent of the enterprise server market. ButNovell is showing some modest, promising revenue growth.
Indeed that may very well be what makes Novell, and Novell'sversion of Linux, attractive to Microsoft. As analysts have noted,SUSE tends to run on a lot of mainframes, and mainframes don'tinterest Microsoft. And SUSE is a small competitor in the enterpriseserver market. Whereas Red Hat is a direct Microsoft competitor, andgrowing. So it suits Steve to put the brakes on Red Hat through itsdeal with Novell, and it suits Microsoft to choose the lesser of theLinux evils if its customers, darn them, are going to insist onrunning Linux as well as Windows in their corporate environments, asthey increasingly do. And it suits Novell to get a big partner tohelp spread SUSE in the enterprise space, to get a couple of nicepay-offs from Microsoft, and have its position in the marketstabilise. Many expect the current lawsuits to disappear quietly aswell.
I asked Tom Francese, Novell executive president for worldwidesales, why Novell was making this move now, and he replied, "Whynot? This is an unprecedented announcement and I think we're in anunprecedented time. And this announcement is based around the notionthat the customer comes first, and is more market-driven thenanything."
In a slantwise reference to the copyright lawsuits withMicrosoft, Francese notes that the market wants "to get the cloud inthe marketplace removed". Both companies are pushinginteroperability: Microsoft because it has to join what it cannotbeat, but join in its own way and its own time; Novell because itknows customers want to run both operating systems and it cannotsimply take on the Windows juggernaut. Hence it will give Microsoftcoupons that it can hand out to its customers to get SUSE Linuxsupport, which means Microsoft customers can be assured ofenterprise level Linux support.
Francese notes, however, that Novell is "a desktop to data centreoffering with the same code" and that Novell will continue tocompete vigorously with Microsoft on other fronts.
For those of us who find this clash and consolidation between themainstream tech titans and grassroots open source companiesfascinating, the past month has been an affirmation that we ain'tseen nothing yet as the Linux market goes ever more mainstream.
It's as if the Greens were talking coalition government with thePDs. I can't wait to see what happens next.
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