OpenMind 2007: The Novell Keynote
Carlos Montero-Luque, the VP of Product Management for Novell's Linux Business Unit, takes the stage to give an overview of Novell's Open Source strategy and role in the market, along with how partnering is a key part of Free Software and Open Source business
If one would expect all BigCo software execs to be clued in about Free Software and Open Source, then the presentation is utterly unsurprising. However, most BigCo software execs - even from organizations like Novell that are now focused on FLOSS - aren't that clued-in about FLOSS.
Refreshingly and perhaps surprisingly, Carlos understands how the market is being shaped by FLOSS and what roles large vendors can play in the market. Of course, his view (or at least his message) is much shaped by the needs of Novell, but you can hardly fault him for this.
Perhaps the quote that best sums up his clued-in-ness is this (from my memory, which may be flawed :) :
The operating system isn't a commodity. The cost of the operating system is zero. Nothing. The cost of ownership isn't zero. People do need services around this and that is what need to provide and what must have value.
If I remember, I'll pull the exact quote off of the video later.
He also covers the types of partnerships that they have (technology partnership, go-to-market partnerships, etc.) and activities that they are undertaking (like power management and efficiency done in conjunction with chip makers, working with chip makers to create Open Source Linus drivers, Xen hypervisor, desktop, etc.)
Carlos rounds up the talk with some notes on the Microsoft and Novell partnership. He pitches it - in big bold type on the slide - as, "Delivering unprecedented customer value". I'm not convinced.
He also pitches one of the benefits as being better compatibility to Open XML and ODF. Yikes. I don't like things that give OOXML the veneer of credibility (especially after Microsoft tried to ram this up the ISO.)
An interesting thing is that, on paper at least, Microsoft is committed to offering SuSE Linux to its customers who have chosen to run both Linux and Windows. I don't expect a bunch of Linux uptake from this, but the implicit endorsement is interesting (and worrying, given Microsoft's fatuous position of Linux being built on their innovation.)
As he wraps up his session, I am a bit disconcerted to see that he casts FLOSS licensing as being complex. While this is true, software licensing is usually a bear and not just in the FLOSS world. If anything, FLOSS licensing can provide much simpler licensing than proprietary software - consider the reams of BSD licensed software.
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Posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 22:52
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October 3rd, 2007 at 6:58
Zak,
thank you for the kind comments on my talk. I do understand the concerns regarding whether "unprecedented customer value" can be provided by our relationship with Microsoft. Obviously that is left, marketing slides aside, to the evaluation of the customers themselves. I would say that our desire is to provide concrete interoperability value in a couple of key areas, virtualization, identity and access management, systems administration, etc. that can use additional work in terms of getting heterogeneous systems to work together. Whether we are going to execute has been a question from just about anyone we've talked to about this from day 1, as our industry is littered by grandiose announcements that dissipated into presentation vapor. I think it's completely fair to judge the value we create among other items by the results of the collaboration in these areas.
The other comment you make is about the complexity of FLOSS licensing. I certainly did not mean to imply that proprietary licensing is easy or simple. Both as a consumer and a vendor of proprietary software in my past, I understand how complicated it can be (and how some agreements, if challenged in court, would probably not even pass the laugh test). But, FLOSS licensing is not completely trivial, especially more for developers in mixed environments (for example in technology partnerships) than for pure open source developers or even consumers, and the context of the comment was specifically about technology collaboration efforts. Our business unit in Novell essentially works in open source, which simplifies things a fair bit. But as I see our systems and identity management partners in Novell use open source projects, or transform proprietary software into open source (hundreds of projects already done), or combine open and proprietary elements into a solution by ourselves or with partners, we all pay a lot of attention that we neither place ourselves into a corner nor we in any way violate the licenses that we are committed to respect or want to use by the way we put together the solutions. So, yes, it is complex, but I did not mean to imply that it is either a completely new issue or a barrier to doing innovative development of solutions. Just the opposite and we are betting our livelihood on our ability to excel at it.
October 11th, 2007 at 9:53
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