MS Linux II

I have for over a decade been in two minds about Novell.

Ever since they bought Digital Research, and for a while continued to provide one of my favorites among command line OS's, DRDOS/GEM. Then they let one of their employees start his own company, Caldera, and take DR/DRDOS with him. Then Caldera started making it's own Linux distribution. Then Caldera sold DR and DRDOS to another company. Last time I looked, DRDOS was an expensive specialist embedded solution with different versions for Lawyers, Doctors and so on.

Caldera meanwhile merged with the Santa Cruz Organisation, a respected commercial Unix company better known as SCO, who had previously bought Unix from Novell, who had bought it from AT&T. Caldera changed it's name to SCO, and continued to make and sell SCO Unix, and Caldera Linux. Around 2002 - 2003, SCO decided that every Linux distribution on the planet had stolen code from Unix, and that was it's copyright, and started lawsuits against Linux vendors. The entire sequence of events known as The SCO Case is discussed on Groklaw. During this time Novell bought Ximian, and became increasingly involved in development of Linux software, including the Evolution Email suite, and the GNOME Desktop.

I've been observing the appearance of a certain executive in various companies over the last 12 years or so. I won't name him, but he's been involved in several companies, joining them at board level just before the time major corporate changes and decisions have been made in those companies. Those changes sometimes have been disastrous for those companies, often in a way that is highly beneficial to a much larger OS and software company. I suspect this person could possibly be a corporate "assassin", that makes sure certain innovative companies don't survive.

I'm not mentioning the companies either ... if the people this person works for are as dangerous as I suspect, it would be unwise. I have a strong survival instinct and have had enough trouble in my life working in dangerous environments and among even more dangerous people. I am in no mood for any threats or other trouble from some corporation.

Shortly after the SCO vs Linux situation, Novell bought SuSE, then offer SuSE users indemnity from SCO's lawsuits. Since Novell acquired SuSE, parts of SuSE and GNOME Desktop have become increasingly dependant on Mono, an Open Source implementation of C Sharp/.NET, a Microsoft patented Object Oriented C based programming language. Also, since Novell bought SuSE, I notice an increasing number of SuSE's original personnel leaving. When I began using SuSE in it's early days, it was a very good thorough product from a German company, some of their core developers being scientists, hence the tradition of a 3d plot of a complex mathematical function being the graphic for the manual cover and distribution box. I appreciated the fact that the OS was under German management, and provided a reasonably good selection of scientific software.

In the last few years, SuSE has grown in popularity. It has always been the Linux of choice for several governments. Also it became the Linux used by IBM, Sun and when SGI moved on from the MIPS processor to 64 bit Intel, SuSE replaced Irix as SGI's OS. However, there needs to be a lot of work before SuSE is the ultimate Linux, let alone OS, for 3d computer graphics, or real time visualisation. One example would be the need to fix it's implementation of GTKGLExt, which does not work well enough to be able to build important 3d modelling applications on SuSE. Another example is SuSE's implementation of Boost, and in particular annoyance to me, libboost.python. The only reason my continual attempts to build Python's CGKit 2 on SuSE kept failing is because the library dynamic linker could not find SuSE's libboost.python even though it was installed and provided with an explicit path to it. Others have had this problem too.

SGI's OS being unable to build important 3d modelling applications and computer graphics toolkits is to me beyond embarrassing. SGI are a very professional company with over twenty years experience in computer graphics, and they have designed and built the finest 3d visualisation and rendering systems in the world for two decades. Further more, I have built code designed for SGI MIPS Workstation systems in the 1990's, on SuSE Linux on my IBM ThinkPad laptop. Their code is so well written and commented, it's a pleasure to read, let alone see it compile and work perfectly. SGI's developers know what they are doing.

By the way, if anyone from SGI reads this and wants to fix this problem, contact me ... I'm bored with things not working, need money, and a Personal Iris-Iris File-Data Station 4d/35, a dual head Octane2 workstation and an Altix 3200 cluster would be much appreciated :)

Now Novell and Microsoft partner, the outcome being that Microsoft are to provide SuSE Linux, these two companies to improve interoperability between their products and a mutual patent protection and indemnity agreement.

Let's leave the legal nightmare this could become to those who have already discussed it, my first few paragraphs above will give you a good idea of where this all could lead.

If this goes ahead, SuSE could be the only Linux officially supported in Virtual PC, the Intel x86 emulator that Microsoft bought from Connectix, and in my experience, the best emulator and as good a product as can be. Microsoft will not tell you this, but Virtual PC can run BeOS, NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP and Rhapsody, enabling old OS's with no support for modern devices like Wifi cards or PCMCIA HDD's to work fine via the Virtual PC's interface to the system's real hardware. Support for SuSE in Virtual PC could include the ability to drag drop between the Windows and Linux desktops, and support for Linux filesystems such as Ext2, Ext3, and ReiserFS. OK, I admit, I've used Ext3 in Windows 2000, but no direct support for it as a VPC Extension between guest and host OS.

Conversely, Novell/SuSE's implementation of WINE, the Windows compatibility runtime for Unix that enables a user to run Windows programs in Unix or Linux, could with support of Microsoft, begin to work a lot better. The support in Linux for running Windows applications needs improvement, and Microsoft approved or supplied DLL's et cetera could be a possible development of this partnership.

Don't expect either Virtual PC support for Linux, or a Microsoft improved version of WINE or CodeWeaver's Crossover Office, to be free.

Now that Apple supply an Intel computer and OS, will Microsoft supply SuSE for PPC ? :)

Finally, here are links to other people's opinions of the Novell Microsoft deal :

A five year deal with Microsoft to dump Novell/SUSE Nicholas Petreley, Linux Journal

More Details on Microsoft SuSE partnership Penguin Pete's Blog

FUD motivated Microsoft SuSE deal analyst Munir Kotadia, ZDNet Australia

Microsoft and Novell: Bambi meets Godzilla? Joyce Becknell, The Register

Microsoft to Novell:Respect Chris Williams, The Register

Moglen: How we'll kill the Microsoft Novell deal Andrew Orlowski, The Register

Microsoft bankrolls Novell to tune of $348m Gavin Clarke, The Register

Microsoft loves SUSE Linux (true!) Gavin Clarke, The Register

Microsoft makes claim on Linux code OUT-LAW.COM, The Register

MS and Novell: the end of a good feud David Norfolk, RegisterDeveloper