To balance that, I got a very positive response from Tom Adelstein, in GovernmentForge:

Those of you who recall a rather contentious company called Novell, should clear your memory cache. Ray Noorda moved over to SCO some time ago and took with him the likes of Darl McBride. The Novell we once knew and about which we scratched our heads changed some time ago. During that time, the media focused little attention on Novell. So, we may need a refresher course...

Consider Novell a new company with new management, key personnel and a bright and friendly smile. The sincerity and professionalism looks very authentic. It comes from the confluence of Cambridge Technology Partners who merged with Novell in 2001 and the dedicated survivors of the old regime.

I've spoken at length with people in Novell management and even took their course on Linux with Novell services.

Anyone can download it for free from here. You should find it a relatively short but extremely enlightening piece. After today, it should become required reading for the Open Source Community.

I have done my due diligence on Novell and like what I see. I read all their SEC filings, tracked down management histories and read everything on which I could get my hands. I even did calculations on their stock prices, did timeline analysis of their financial statements and coordinated them to significant events.

This is a new management team, very bright, very intelligent. They had a regime change and that brought the company back to life. It's a brand new, very exciting group of people. A new company and a model for others to follow.

If you have any lingering pictures of Novell, put them on the side of the road. This is all goodness for OSS. I can also tell you I was skeptical going into my review. So, this was a pleasant surprise.

So those are your two extremes.

Most of what I've been getting is guardedly positive. Such as this from Phil Windley <http://windley.com/>, ctformer CIO of Utah:

I've been hearing some rumors of this for a few weeks. Nothing specific, just "Novell's moving big into Linux."

Clearly this shows Novell is looking for be a player in a way that they could never accomplish by just selling applications and system add-ons for Windows. The acquisition of Ximian gave Novell a cache of great Linux products, but that doesn't really help them out of their funk. Novell still has a large installed base of NetWare customers that they need to migrate to something with a future or lose to Microsoft. Now they've got a server they can use to backfill Netware. They can't do that with a Linux server that they don't have pretty tight control over, so buying a Linux company is a natural choice: it gives them a product, lots of Linux expertise to tap, and some credibility.

This is probably a good thing for Linux users in general because there's likely to be some good work done on making Linux work well inside the corporate IT shop. Most large IT shops don't have the luxury of being a pure Linux or Microsoft shop. They have to be both. Linux has made some great strides toward being a good corporate citizen. This provides more pressure in that direction.

I guess its hard to find a downside.

Dave Aiello, president of CTDATA (a Linux-savvy company that builds database-driven websites for companies in the New York Metro area) sees the buy as an open source community play:

I think you have to look at the SuSE acquisition in the same light as the release by IBM of Eclipse as a free product. A network effects calculation is being done here. I think IBM looked at Eclipse and said, this product has greater value to us if it's in the hands of an Open Source community than if we keep selling it. If we keep total control of it, we have to enhance it, market it, and provide for the development of ancillary products from our own resources.

If the product is backed by an Open Source community, the founders get the benefit of free labor, free product enhancement ideas, and ancillary product branches that they don't have to support unless the company has an overwhelming interest.

I think this is what's happened with Netscape->Mozilla and WebSphere Studio App Developer -> Eclipse. It is what Red Hat hopes will happen with Fedora, and ultimately, what IBM is hoping for with SuSE. I think IBM's ultimate interest is in having a credible alternative to Red Hat that they have substantial influence over, without having the overhead of developing internally.

This is more about addressing customer CIO level concerns about not repeating the Wintel single source market than about the fact that IBM doesn't like Red Hat's Enterprise Linux strategy, per se.

Allen Harrell, an IT outsource specialist in Arizona, says this:

If Novell can make Linux work across the enterprise regardless of size, this is a good thing.. After all, Novell was the first company to get print services running across the network. Novell 6's client for windows machines is about a slick piece of software. letting you access all the files on your network regardless of type -- an area where windows fails at miserably. I have a Red Hat 6 drive in my machine right now that the BIOS picks up but Windows doesn't even list it.

NetWare also logs off all the clients and notifies you, which allows them to keep running while it reboots, which is an area where Windows gives you the blue screen of death.

With Red Hat getting out of the personal OS biz <http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/33760.html> Lindows will get some more traction. I mean, hell, if you can buy a Lindows computer at Wal-Mart., those folks who were afraid of 'trailer trash' showing up on the Net have a real good reason to fear now.

One upbeat response I've been hearing is that this deal will be good for Debian. So I asked Debian co-founder Ian Murdock, CEO of Progeny <http://www.progeny.com>, for his take. Here's what he said:

My initial reaction is that this is very good news for Linux, both industry and community.

Industry-wise, the distribution world has started to head down a dangerous road this past year, and this move certainly promises to shake things up quite a bit. My hope is it will shake things up enough to allow a course correction. I'm optimistic, because from what I've seen, Novell is doing all the right things. They seem to understand that what's truly unique about Linux is the ecosystem and community around Linux, and they seem genuinely interested in building a symbiotic relationship that benefits both Novell and the larger community of which Novell is now part.

Community-wise, the bigger our community and the bigger our friends, the more we as a community can accomplish.

I also asked Ian about Red Hat's recent decision <http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/33760.html> to discontinue Red Hat Linux (leaving Fedora in its place <http://fedora.redhat.com/>). He responded,

This is another case of Red Hat leaving a void in the market, and voids equal opportunities. We're still assessing what opportunities might exist for Progeny as a result of this latest move. I can tell you that we've seen a lot of interest in Debian in the enterprise over the past few months, when people first started to see this coming, as well as a more flexible migration path from Red Hat 7.x than Red Hat is offering.

Ian also pointed to his blog, where he said,

The IT industry wants to break the chains of single-vendor reliance and proprietary lock-in, whether the lock-in is based on proprietary technology or some clever new scheme. But is the only way to break these chains to bring everything in-house?

Actually, no. Progeny provides a third option: We're an outsource provider of Linux distribution maintenance that allows companies to essentially have their own Linux distributions, with a feature set, roadmap, and support model tailored to their needs rather than the vendor's, all without having to bring the distribution management function in-house.

It's a non-intuitive business model for an OS company, at least at first, because we're so used to being at the whims of our vendors. We're so used to it that the same model has carried forward from the proprietary OS world to the Linux distribution world. Now that Red Hat is turning the screws on the thumbs that have been so carefully positioned over the last several years, people are starting to realize they moved to open-source operating systems precisely to get away from this kind of screw-turning.

Unlike pontificating we-solve-everything major vendors, however, Ian doesn't pretend to have all the answers. Or even close to enough of them:

And now, a Cluetrain-inspired question:

Progeny's primary focus is on building distributions for what we like to call "Linux-powered products", products that are Linux-based but where Linux is just one layer of the overall stack, and possibly an invisible one at that. Lately, though, we've had a lot of folks ask if we might consider applying our customer- rather than vendor-centric approach to Linux to the more general-purpose deployment/enterprise space. Could we provide support for enterprise Debian deployments? Could we keep the updates coming for Red Hat 7.x after they are end-of-lifed at the end of the year?

So, market, would this be interesting to you? Talk to me, good, bad or indifferent.

Frankly, I'm having a problem even caring about what Novell is up to. That's because I'm fed up with the Cult of the Vendor. And that's what this subject is all about. Or at least the level of attention we give to it.

Linux isn't a vendor product. Never was, never will be. It's not even a product. It's a project by a development community that includes many vendors but isn't driven by any of them. Same goes for other members of the LAMP suite, with the single exception of MySQL, which owns the code (making it, in that sense, proprietary) but locates development squarely inside the community, rather than in its own corporate container. In other words, they are very unvendor-like. Market-compliant, I'd say.

Development communities like Linux's grew out of the need to do what vendors couldn't do, or wouldn't do. That doesn't make vendors bad or anything; it just puts them in perspective. They can't do everything. And now they don't have to.

It's only natural for press guys like me to look at vendors as leaders. We've been doing that since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. But there's another kind of revolution going on here, and it isn't happening on the supply side. It's happening on the demand side.

Linux and open source are ways that the demand side supplies itself. Of course, in some cases the demand side also supplies. IBM, for example. But it helps to remember that IBM went gaga over Linux only after the OS was already widely adopted inside the company -- by technologists which in some cases were also Linux developers. The company wisely got in alignment with market reality it was experiencing at the cellular level. They did it first (for a big company, anyway), and they deserve kudos for that. But not for driving Linux. They help a lot; but it's not their project to drive.

Perhaps Novell is going through the same kind of cell-change thing. My point here is that it doesn't matter as much as all the breathless headlines and analyses say it matters.

Here's how Doug Kaye, the author, analyst and Web services guru, puts it:

Fifteen years ago the vendors provided the vision. There was no other source. No "community" of users, and certainly no Internet by which we could share ideas. The trade shows (Comdex, NCC) and the trade papers (Computerworld) were how we got our vision, and they were controlled by the vendors.

High schools and colleges are now all about open source. It's LAMP everywhere. Open Source is now also the new source for "vision" for IT managers and CIOs. How do you know what's real and not just vaporware? Go to the bookstore and look at the O'Reilly end cap display. There you'll see the LAMP titles: Linux, Apache, mySQL, and the Ps. These are the technologies from which one can quickly and inexpensively build industrial-strength applications.

Bottom line: You're on your own, but you're not alone.

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Doc Searls is senior editor of Linux Journal.