Why people don’t like Novell

Recently people have been been criticizing Novell for their deal with Microsoft and mono, I feel they do not see the benefits to the community which these bring.

The deal with Microsoft seems to be win-win for the community in my opinion; Microsoft have pledged to add full Open Document Format to office, this means that in the future OpenOffice.org users will be able to freely share files with office users instead of using Office’s awful proprietary format. Many people have suggested that Office’s ODF support will be extremely poor; I believe this is unlikely as ODF is a standard meant to be implemented (unlike OOXML), it is less than a tenth of the size and with Novel’s help if Microsoft are even slightly serious about implementing the standard all the need to do is put in a tiny bit of work to get very high fidelity support. Microsoft are also recommending SLED (possibly the worst thing they could do for it PR wise), meaning that enterprises can deploy it whilst being supported. They have also said they won’t sue the users of Novel Linux over patents (in a decidedly patronizing manor, but then they are Microsoft) that can’t be a bad thing.

And what will Novel do in return? They will make Linux run better within Microsoft’s virtual machine technology and help make Windows server run better under Xen. Either way this means more Linux (virtual) servers used within enterprise. They will also make their identity management solutions work better with active directory, this will mean that it is easier to deploy Linux within within Windows networks once again meaning more Linux within enterprise. And all of this code is open so any other distro can use the knowledge.

Novel have also been critisised by many over Mono. While many assume that mono is some how not open source this is definetly not the case, you can download the code today from mono-project.com if you want (the fsf even started a similar project called gnudotnet first). Many people also think that it is just a way of porting Windows programs, it is not; it allows developers to use the C# language which they may already be familiar with if they have programmed on Windows (nothing wrong with converting Windows programmers to Linux). While some argue that the Microsoft implementation will always be slightly newer so mono won’t be able to attract developers they are forgetting how awesome Linux is, HAL and the massive amount of libraries available make Linux the much better development platform. While people use submarine patents as a reason not to use mono that same reason is being used against ogg; patents are a tool of extortion, we should not let the fear of them make us loose valuable code.