“Novell on Mar. 1 announced preliminary financial results for its 2007 fiscal year first quarter, showing net revenue of USD 230 million. The first quarter’s revenue represented a decline of USD 12 million, or about 5 percent, from the prior year’s first quarter revenue of USD 242 million. Despite the unexceptional overall results during the first fiscal quarter 2007, however, Novell reported USD 15 million of revenue from Linux Platform Products, up 46 percent year-over-year, and USD 91 million of invoicing, up a whopping 659 percent year-over-year. Linux – make no doubt about it – is Novell’s future.”
Linux – make no doubt about it – is Novell’s future
It is everyone’s future. At least in my dreams
I’d love to see it too but for the mean time the future of Linux is on the server, its going to be a while before we start seeing Linux make inroads on the desktop given the dearth of applications on Linux.
Things like cd burners and chat applications are easy stuff, anyone can make those, the problems start to multiple when people want things like Quicken/MYOB like applications, Office suites that are compatible and feature rich like Office, or graphics applications like Photoshop, Illustator, Corel Painter, and the likes.
What is holding Linux back isn’t the desktop; GNOME and KDE are more than adequate for the end users needs; the problem is that third party software vendors sitting on the side lines pissing and moaning about the evils of the Microsoft monopoly which failing to hedge their beats by porting their applications to an alternative platform that can run on generic pc’s.
The day when you see the big softare comapnies port their consumer and professional software to Linux or some other UNIX is the day when you see a massive drop in marketshare from Microsoft in all the areas which they dominate.
kawai, don’t you get tired of always posting the same message? In every Linux thread on this web site, you have to post your “Linux has no quality applications” rant. We get it. Linux isn’t ready for you. No need to hammer us with it.
Personally, Linux is ready *for me*. I can produce professional quality documents, including illustrations, using OpenOffice and Gimp. I can do things in Gimp that 95% of Photoshop users wouldn’t know how to do (I know how to do them in Photoshop as well – after all, I’ve been using it since version 2.0). OpenOffice is a very feature-rich Office suite, and it’s now easier to exchange documents with MS Office. Just in case, I also have MS Office installed – it runs flawlessly with the latest version of Crossover.
Quicken? Well, I don’t use it much anymore, but it runs flawlessly under Wine as well. However, I now use kmymoney2. It’s not as feature-rich as Quicken, but it is quite enough to manage my money, and its interface is much better.
I respect the fact that *you* feel that there aren’t enough quality apps for Linux – even though I strongly disagree – but really you’re starting to sound like a broken record.
kawai, don’t you get tired of always posting the same message? In every Linux thread on this web site, you have to post your “Linux has no quality applications” rant. We get it. Linux isn’t ready for you. No need to hammer us with it.
And you know sugar buns, this is the situation for the vast majority of people; if the vast majority of people *weren’t* reliant on specific software, wouldn’t commonsense dicatate that there would be mass migration given how bloody easy it is to obtain and install Linux.
Personally, Linux is ready *for me*. I can produce professional quality documents, including illustrations, using OpenOffice and Gimp. I can do things in Gimp that 95% of Photoshop users wouldn’t know how to do (I know how to do them in Photoshop as well – after all, I’ve been using it since version 2.0). OpenOffice is a very feature-rich Office suite, and it’s now easier to exchange documents with MS Office. Just in case, I also have MS Office installed – it runs flawlessly with the latest version of Crossover.
GimpShop does a good job, and does what I need – it would be nice if the interface became the default for GIMP, it would finally fix the horrendince mess that is GIMPs current GUI.
Office 2007 doesn’t work with Crossover Office, but given that I’ve recently upgraded to Windows Vista due to the dismal nature of Ubuntu in regards to performance on my laptop, same can be same for OpenSuSE and Fedora, I might give Linux an experiment in two years once it is more mature.
Quicken? Well, I don’t use it much anymore, but it runs flawlessly under Wine as well. However, I now use kmymoney2. It’s not as feature-rich as Quicken, but it is quite enough to manage my money, and its interface is much better.
Quicken is a crap application, the biggy is MYOB; so many small businesses rely on it, it isn’t funny; in New Zealand and Australia alone it has 90% of the market and Quicken due to the America-centric nature is now trying to claw back marketshare, its not going to happen, they lost marketshare because of their arrogance.
I respect the fact that *you* feel that there aren’t enough quality apps for Linux – even though I strongly disagree – but really you’re starting to sound like a broken record.
Maybe as a Linux advocate you can address that problem, then I might move to Linux, until then I am stuck with Windows Vista with Office 2007 and having to put up with the massive amount of applications available and the huge number of devices supported both out of the box and via supplied drivers.
Tis a tough life I live, having a laptop where I can do everything I want with minimum fuss – I really envy you and your inability to access software titles from the big names, being screwed into a corner and at the mercy of pimply face teenagers and whether they’ll actually maintain their pet hobby.
The Office issue appears to be addressed; I had a look at the flash intro on the IBM Notes site about a preview into Notes 8.0 – which will be eclipsed based, and it appears that it addresses all the issues I currently have with OpenOffice.org.
It will apparently be released the middle to end of this year, but I’d prefer waiting till its new code base is more mature – its a massive change so there are going to be some hickups in the transition.
Hopefully once that is released, some big names will finally realise that since IBM is taking Linux on the desktop seriously, they too should do the same – possibly even use Eclipse as the basis of their application; the ultimate wet dream of mine, the big companies pushing all their applications from their dependence on win32 to running ontop of Eclipse and finally make their applications no longer dependent on Windows technologies in favour of opensource and openstandards.
And you know sugar buns, this is the situation for the vast majority of people; if the vast majority of people *weren’t* reliant on specific software, wouldn’t commonsense dicatate that there would be mass migration given how bloody easy it is to obtain and install Linux.
Not at all, honey. Even if all the software you mention *was* available on Linux, there wouldn’t be a mass migration overnight.
Linux and Linux covers the needs of the majority of computer users. The fact that they migrate only slowly is due to most being unaware of alternatives (many computer users don’t understand what an OS is in the first place), as well as inertia.
Office 2007 doesn’t work with Crossover Office,
Who cares? Office XP and 2003 are excellent office suites. There is very little reason to upgrade to Office 2007 apart from the fact that it’s the latest fad. But you just keep moving those goalposts back, now. You look so cute when you do that.
Tis a tough life I live, having a laptop where I can do everything I want with minimum fuss
You mean, just like me? I can do everything I need with my Kubuntu laptop, including desktop enhancements more advanced than Vista, drivers that work for all my hardware, software from big names under Crossover (or, when necessary, my Windows partition running in VMWare), all while not having to worry about malware or the fact that I support an abusive monopoly. I’ve got the best of both world, while you have a barely-ready OS that inefficiently uses its hardware and will soon be plagued with the usual deluge of viruses and spyware.
In any case, you missed my point. Stop repeating the same broken-record argument over and over again. We get it. Linux is not ready for *you*. No need to obsessively bring it up every time Linux is mentioned.
Sheesh! Sometimes I *really* miss a block user functionality on this site.
Nice to see you completely ignore the reply I made to that post *CORRECTING* some of the assumptions I made – but hey, easier to flame than read the FULL story.
Sorry, it was very late here when I replied (4AM) and I had had more than a few beers. I did note your second post.
Again, I respect your opinion completely. I also wish that there were more apps from big commercial vendors. It would be a boost for Linux, certainly. However, I do not agree that the absence of such apps makes Linux useless. It certainly doesn’t for me, and IMO it doesn’t for a very large proportion of users.
What I was objecting to is the fact that you always bring this up in every Linux thread. It’s becoming tedious.
Apart from that, I often find your posts insightful, and regularly agree with you. You should just try to focus a bit more on the positive…
Again, I respect your opinion completely. I also wish that there were more apps from big commercial vendors. It would be a boost for Linux, certainly. However, I do not agree that the absence of such apps makes Linux useless. It certainly doesn’t for me, and IMO it doesn’t for a very large proportion of users.
Where do I say that Linux is useless? if you look through the posts I make, I heap praise on Linux as if it were the second coming – what I point out is that for Linux to *gain* more marketshare beyond the niche which it occupies now, applications from big name vendors are required – applications which Joe and Jane Doe are comfortable using.
I never said Linux was useless, infact on several occasions I’ve actually said that Linux is superior to Windows and more than ready to be a Windows replacement – search through my posts and it is there in black/white/grey/what ever colour is used on this board.
I guess the problem with me is that I am impatient in the fact that Linux (and many other UNIX’s) is already up to scratch to run on the average desktop and yet we have lazy software companies unwilling to get off their ass, pull their tongue out of Microsofts preverbial bottom and take notice that Linux offers them a level playground to sell their products on – it isn’t dominated by one player who continually underminds standards, and vicious competition between the two largest Linux vendors, Novell and Red Hat, ensure that progress in the marketplace is always going forward rather than stagnating as with the case of Windows.
What I was objecting to is the fact that you always bring this up in every Linux thread. It’s becoming tedious.
Maybe I dream too much that maybe some Adobe employees will see a constant whiner demanding products that they’ll pull finger and finally provide native versions of their applications for Linux or atleast some other type of UNIX like FreeBSD or OpenSolaris.
I hear you. For what it’s worth, I am a bit impation about big software vendors providing versions of their apps for Linux as well…if they don’t, I do hope that open-source alternatives will continue to improve and gnaw away at their market share.
Hence the reason I push for GIMP to adopt the Photoshop like GUI from GIMPShop – there is nothing wrong with the fundamentals of GIMP – what, IMHO sucks is its interface for those who are used to navigating a SDI basd interface where as GIMP is MDI.
I like all my application windows in the same window, not scattered around everywhere as with GIMP; with one menu at the top – hence my hope that Krita and KDE friends do something about it by providing atleast an interface for us Photoshop people can be happy with
Tis a tough life I live, having a laptop where I can do everything I want with minimum fuss – I really envy you and your inability to access software titles from the big names, being screwed into a corner and at the mercy of pimply face teenagers and whether they’ll actually maintain their pet hobby.
Ummm, can you use your laptop without being connected to the internet and without calling Microsoft to confirm your WGA past the 30 days Vista requires to check that it’s legit?
Yeah, I know that not many people need that functionality but I’d like to have the option to use my computer without having to be wired to the net or phone Microsoft and ask them for permission to use my own computer.
Ummm, can you use your laptop without being connected to the internet and without calling Microsoft to confirm your WGA past the 30 days Vista requires to check that it’s legit?
Yeah, I know that not many people need that functionality but I’d like to have the option to use my computer without having to be wired to the net or phone Microsoft and ask them for permission to use my own computer.
Let me see – ah, I’m already activated! thats it – I *CAN* want if I want, for the automatic activation to occur OR I can activate it manually, which I do – no 30 days for me then!
Let me see – ah, I’m already activated! thats it – I *CAN* want if I want, for the automatic activation to occur OR I can activate it manually, which I do – no 30 days for me then!
Maybe I misunderstood the license but from this section is the one I’m concerned about.
5. VALIDATION.
a. The software will from time to time validate the software, update or require download of
the validation feature of the software. Validation verifies that the software has been
activated and is properly licensed. Validation also permits you to use certain features of
the software or to obtain additional benefits. For more information, see
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=39157.
b. During a validation check, the software will send information about the software and the
device to Microsoft. This information includes the version and product key of the
software, and the Internet protocol address of the device. Microsoft does not use the
information to identify or contact you. By using the software, you consent to the
transmission of this information. For more information about validation and what is sent
during a validation check, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=69500.
c. If, after a validation check, the software is found not to be properly licensed, the
functionality of the software may be affected. For example, you may
· need to reactivate the software, or
· receive reminders to obtain a properly licensed copy of the software,
or you may not be able to
· use or continue to use some of the features of the software, or
· obtain certain updates or upgrades from Microsoft.
So my understanding is that if Vista can’t validate itself then you’re screwed. And in 30 days it goes into reduced functionality mode.
Boy, I wish I could mod you up some more.
On the subject of Quicken, let me point out that AFAIK it’s not much use outside of North America anyway.
I really envy you and your inability to access software titles from the big names, being screwed into a corner and at the mercy of pimply face teenagers and whether they’ll actually maintain their pet hobby.
You think OOo is written “pimply face teenagers” then I am sure that you know nothing about Sun Microsystems hiring policy. Indeed I am sure they wouldn’t hire you.
In reply to kaiwai:
Big software vendors can go out of business, too. As a matter of fact, if open source software authors gives up, there is a fair chance that someone else will pick up, if there is sufficient interest.
Examples are IceWM, Jython….
I am not open source advocate, but those are the facts. There is no 100% guarantee either way….
DG
Punktyras, what do you care about other people’s future ?
They will use an OS that they see fit.
This is no different from Bill Gates who once said that he will put Windows on every PC by year 2000.
Is it about World domination, or what ? Why don’t you people mind your own business ?
DG
Novell really has done a great job with SLED. I use Red Hat at work and just seeing the polish on SLED there is just no comparison on the desktop. No, not Ubuntu either.
This success is well deserved.
Novell really has done a great job with SLED. I use Red Hat at work and just seeing the polish on SLED there is just no comparison on the desktop. No, not Ubuntu either.
I think some perspective needs to be put on this. These are Novell’s financial results – it is not a review of SLED or OpenSuse. It really doesn’t matter how much polish they’re putting on SLED or how fast or slow Suse’s distro is, or whether they use KDE or Gnome (although all those things combined might contribute). Whatever, things are not working for them.
This success is well deserved.
You can’t really call the above success.
As always, our favorite anti-Novell troll comes to give us a litle of his poison.
Suse is a great distro, don’t get me wrong. It’s stable, lots of features and packages.
But man is this thing heavy. I just don’t get it. And no, it’s not Beagle. It’s not Kerry. Neither one do I have running. Even when I leave my computer on for several days. I’ve seen Suse on other computers. It’s just slow by comparison.
I don’t get it, I’ve tried several distros and most feel much snappier with only small differences between them. I really really love YAST, but I can’t take it anymore. Going from Suse to any other and you get that same WOW feeling that you get from moving to windows to linux. The weight is gone.
I’m really looking forward to Fedora 7, especially now that they have a KDE spin.
Yes, SuSE is heavy. I don’t use it myself, but when testing it I had to tweak it a bit to turn it into something usable. For what I remember:
– Using KDE instead of gnome
– Disabling AppArmour
– Removing mono and all packages that depend on it (this was the biggest gain by far, but it can only be done in KDE, IIRC).
– Going to the services in YAST and stopping everything I wasn’t sure I needed.
After doing this I won’t say it screamed, but at least it was on par with the mainstream distros.
> But man is this thing heavy. I just don’t get it. And no, it’s not Beagle. It’s not Kerry. Neither one do I have running. Even when I leave my computer on for several days. I’ve seen Suse on other computers. It’s just slow by comparison.
What exactly do you mean with heavy?
When I compare openSUSE with (K)Ubuntu I must say that the responsiveness of KDE and Gnome is much better on openSUSE! I tried it on Aspire 1353 and Thinkpad Z61m.
Start time of applications varies: some start faster under openSUSE other start faster under (K)Ubuntu.
The only thing which is slower, is boot time under openSUSE compared with (K)Ubuntu. But this equalizes a little bit if you enable all system processes under (K)Ubuntu like preload, sth. comparable to AppArmor, a firewall like Guarddog etc.
After doing that boot time difference wasn’t that much any more.
All in all I cannot confirm that openSUSE is heavy or slow in any means.
And memory consumption is not worse compared with other Linux distributions if you enable Beagle and all that stuff there…
Good for Novell Im really happy for them.
SuSE is not a bad distribution in itself. However, I think sometimes it just tries to differentiate itself for the sake of differentiating itself. For example, pushing ReiserFS instead of Ext3, pushing XGL instead of AIGLX, pushing AppArmor instead of SELinux, pushing KDE instead of Gnome, pushing YAST… I think they generally choose an inferior technology and in the end, it always ends up biting them in the butt. Just look at the above list and see how many of the “alternative” technologies they are still pushing rather than going the route of every other Linux distribution. I bet in a year or two, when SELinux is easy to use, AppArmor will also be out. I personally think the best thing they could do is not try to differentiate themselves on the product (after all, Debian, RedHat, Ubuntu, and Suse are all basically the same product with minor differences) but rather try to differentiate themselves on their support, services, and partnerships with 3rd party vendors.
Oh dear, I must have said something thats completely true but a SuSE zealot found offensive. Please brave soul who marked me down, identify yourself and refute what I said.
>SuSE is not a bad distribution in itself. However, I think sometimes it just tries to differentiate itself for the sake of differentiating itself. For example, pushing ReiserFS instead of Ext3, pushing XGL instead of AIGLX, pushing AppArmor instead of SELinux, pushing KDE instead of Gnome, pushing YAST… I think they generally choose an inferior technology and in the end, it always ends up biting them in the butt. Just look at the above list and see how many of the “alternative” technologies they are still pushing rather than going the route of every other Linux distribution. I bet in a year or two, when SELinux is easy to use, AppArmor will also be out. I personally think the best thing they could do is not try to differentiate themselves on the product (after all, Debian, RedHat, Ubuntu, and Suse are all basically the same product with minor differences) but rather try to differentiate themselves on their support, services, and partnerships with 3rd party vendors.<
I think you have it all wrong, the reason their Linux growth is consistently on the up is because they sell a different product then everybody else. Many of the things they use that are different from other distros are developed in house which in turn makes support much easier then using something developed elsewhere.
As far as the KDE over Gnome thing, Suse has always been a KDE centric distro from the begining, Gnome was always an afterthought. And I might add that on Suse, KDE definitly outperforms Gnome on the speed front.
Novell reported $15 million of revenue from Linux Platform Products, up 46 percent year-over-year
It’s pitiful. Red Hat would be ashamed. It might be a 46% increase, and that shows you just how low it has been, but it is still only $15 million. It is still an extremely small proportion of their total revenue, and the decline in revenue from this point last year is 80% of that figure to put it into perspective.
The revenue from Novell’s identity and access management was $24 million, down 7 percent
Oh dear. People seem to be continuing to jump ship from eDirectory, and it is still a very small figure even adding the 7% back on.
Combined revenue from Open Enterprise Server and products related to NetWare declined 18 percent from the year ago period.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. This is a huge decline over just a year from what is Novell’s core (and they tellingly don’t even try and reveal what the actual figure is). It seems they can’t even get people to move to OES from Netware, and people are leaving in droves as a result.
You can ignore just about everything else here. That decline for Netware and its supposed successor is the real barometer in there as far as Novell is concerned.
and $91 million of invoicing, up a whopping 659 percent year-over-year.
I’m not entirely sure what invoicing means here, but I really hope it isn’t Novell running around trying to get people to pay their bills.
Both of these substantial increases were attributed to the the Microsoft agreement completed during the first fiscal quarter of 2007. The Microsoft partnership alone put $348 million into Novell’s pockets.
Dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Having to breath life into your cash flow situation via a cash injection from a direct competitor. The total sum is even roughly equivalent to Novell’s total cash flow. Unbelievable. I repeat again: Microsoft is Novell’s competitor.
If this is Novell’s Linux strategy then I suggest they re-think it, because they’re currently turning away Netware-using companies in droves that have constituted the bulk of their revenue since they were founded. Regardless of the new found open source stuff, they need to look after these people.
Edited 2007-03-02 23:36
Dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Having to breath life into your cash flow situation via a cash injection from a direct competitor. The total sum is even roughly equivalent to Novell’s total cash flow. Unbelievable. I repeat again: Microsoft is Novell’s competitor.
Yeah, Novell is finished!
From now on it’s just a downhill ride.
You don’t suckle from your competitors (in this case the devil’s) tit, back-stabbing the whole Linux community in the process, and say everything is okeydokey.
Does anyone know how much of their revenue is from MS’s cash injection?
What these figures show is that Novell is doing a good job on Linux, though starting from a very low base, but is quite unable to stop the slide in its traditional, core business. Folks are not transitioning from Netware to Novell’s new replacement offerings; instead they are moving off to “competitors”, er in most cases Microsoft, one presumes.
The problem for Novell is that the slide in their core business is many times greater in financial terms than the growth in their Linux business. So a nasty gap has developed and it is gradually pulling the company down. If Novell, today, suddenly became a pure Linux business, then it would be about one-tenth of the size it is now. So, 90 per cent of Novell’s employees would be fired and the results would go from turning over +/- a billion a year to +/- $100 million a year, if even that.
Novell’s Microsoft deal has, literally, bought it cash. So that’s the gap plugged, for a short while. And then? Novell’s financial plight makes SuSE look like a risky play, a play with a fatal weakness, no matter how good you think the SuSE products are (and most folks, rightly, think them very good indeed).
The solution, eventually, will probably be some kind of buyout or rescue of what is left of Novell. That’s why it is fatuous and propagandist to claim that Linux is Novell’s future. If Novell ever gets to the point where Linux is all it has left, it will no longer be Novell or remotely recognizable for the company it is today. The horror is that by then SuSE could have become one of Microsoft’s portfolio of server tools, perhaps with a smiling Mr Ballmer praising SuSE’s rich heritage of hyper-leveraged profit-enhancement and cash-engineering technologies, etc, etc.
All this gloom and doom is uncalled for. Novell is the only company to offer a corporate desktop worth deploying, easy to support with a tested directory service and a tested groupware server.
Novell’s biggest problem is that it hasn’t learned that they way to get people to pay for support is to give away the software to enough admins so that they will run it at home and in small scale installations and charge support and customization for the big installations for bigger clients.
But as far as products go, Novell is unmatched in the Linux or directory service space.
Have they made mistakes? Plenty.
1) Getting in bed with Microsoft.
2) Not making KDE their corporate desktop, which would ease development because it rests on a foundation that is easier to support and extend. If I were running a Linux corporate desktop, there is no way in hell that I would be supporting two desktops, although I would support applications from both desktops.
3) Going for .NET and the whole mono enchilada, with the attendant performance and legal issues. Without mono, the deal with Microsoft may have never happened.
Red Hat has a huge first-player advantage in the corporate market, but don’t discount Novell. They offer some truly amazing products.
Going for .NET and the whole mono enchilada, with the attendant performance and legal issues. Without mono, the deal with Microsoft may have never happened.
Hmm, the legal issues aren’t the big problem; the big problem is the continual payments required to Microsoft from the Linux camp – but the person to blame for bringing dot net to Linux isn’t Novell or Ximian; the bringing of dot net to Linux was merely a biproduct of Sun unwilling to opensource Java with its list of lies and excuses as to why they couldn’t do it.
If there wasn’t the issue with Sun and Java was opensource, the need to bring dot net to Linux would never have existed and Novell would have spent time along with Red Hat creating Java bindings for GNOME based technologies along with making SWT-GTK the default Java widget set for GNOME development.
The irony of the whole thing, Beagle was a port of an existing Java product that was adapted to mono and GNOME – so we would have gotten many of the features we see today except running on some sort of enhanced version of Java which included shared VM and the likes.
Regarding the performance hit of VM based software as bought up in your post; there is nothing wrong with VM based software, its benefits in regards to speeding up software development, improved stability and security – Lotus Notes 8.0 which is in development and based on on the Eclipse framework is an awesome application and definately defuses any ‘Java is crap for general purpose applications’.
Java doesn’t suck; Swing sucks, and the horse that is constantly beaten by Sun isn’t going to correct the situation; SWT-GTK should ultimately be the defacto standard widget kit for Java development IMHO, it integrates well with *NIX GNOME desktop.
One (or a couple) bad experience with Java shouldn’t be used as a benchmark as to whether the idea of Java persay is a good framework for GNOME or whether Mono is.
but the person to blame for bringing dot net to Linux isn’t Novell or Ximian; the bringing of dot net to Linux was merely a biproduct of Sun unwilling to opensource Java with its list of lies and excuses as to why they couldn’t do it.
If that’s the reason, the blame still falls squarely on Ximian. They could afterall have joined efforts with Kaffe, gjc and Classpath creating a free Java regardless of Sun.
At least Java is finally getting a decent GUI toolkit now, combined with becoming GPL perhaps we’ll see some good apps coming out of it.
Edited 2007-03-04 15:01
If that’s the reason, the blame still falls squarely on Ximian. They could afterall have joined efforts with Kaffe, gjc and Classpath creating a free Java regardless of Sun.
True, but at the same time, they probably looked at both situations; create a dot net implementation or help implement, couple that with the perception that C# makes up for deficiences back when Java was missing a whole heap of features which C# natively included with the language, one can hardly blame Ximian when you look at the bigger picture, even when comparing the two technologies purely on technology grounds.
At least Java is finally getting a decent GUI toolkit now, combined with becoming GPL perhaps we’ll see some good apps coming out of it.
True; I don’t think Sun is going to give up on Swing, but what you will see is is SWT simply become the defacto standard used by device manufacturers such as Nokia with gtk becoming the toolkit of choice for future development, and application vendors like IBM via Eclipse using it for application development.
The better approach I think with Java is not necessarily “write once, run everywhere” but instead aim for something atleast along the lines of “write once and make porting easier” – so then atleast there is the benefit of portability whilst at the same time being able to integrate it in well with each unique desktop rather than trying to have a GUI with the lowest common demoninator widgets and have uniformity accross all platforms.
First off do not give up on the SLED desktop market it is a very nice slick professional looking OS that blows Vista off the planet!
NOW if SuSE is smart they will work out a deal having dual boot with Vista that would be an awesome achievement for Linux and the end user.
I myself have been an avid Red Hat user since 99 and currently using FC6 (nice by the way) but I want to load up Open SuSE and check it out in the future…
Linux is its own worst foe by starting a distro on the desktop and dumping it faster than a stray cat with kittens!
Torrent link… please.
http://linuxtracker.org/browse.php
Take a look at this LWN article entitled, “Who Wrote 2.6.20:
http://lwn.net/Articles/222773/
And find the part where it says “Who Paid Them”.
Top changeset contributors by employer
(Unknown) 1244 25.0%
Red Hat 636 12.8%
(None) 383 7.7%
IBM 368 7.4%
Novell 295 5.9%
That is the number or changesets per employer to the latest Linux kernel. It shows you how much they care compared to other companies by the amount of work they do on it.
Novell employees some brilliant developers like Federico, Robert Love, etc, but they need to focus more on their future and less on shortterm gains to survive.