One thing is for sure – this is going to be a roller coaster ride for Novell execs and employees. Novell actually has a lot of cash relative to its revenues so it was only a matter of time before someone would go raiding. Elliott is in it for a flip profit … and the financials are lined up perfectly. (or someone behind Elliot who is in it for other reasons ;-) This is a savvy move, but also as Andy says a potentially dangerous game – if they win and overpaid.

If you’re reading any analysis of the situation, make sure you read Andy’s take in the link below. At the end of the day, the GPL, Suse, the technology, etc won’t matter – this is going to be a nasty game billion dollar chicken game for profits.

http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20100304051547830

I haven’t seen any article yet, though,  that describes in detail how the high stakes game of tender offers is played, and how the usual process maps (and doesn’t) to a high tech company like Novell.  So I thought I’d provide an overview for those that haven’t had occasion to follow a tender offer in the past, and also my thoughts on what may happen over the next several months in this particular game of cat and mouse.

Oh, I forgot to mention that the IBM solution runs on Ubuntu and can be easily deployed on RHEL/SLED too ;-)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/04/ibm_linux_lotus_virtual_desktop/

IBM is working with Virtual Bridges and its VERDE (Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment) product to ship a virtual Canonical Ubuntu Linux desktop, with Lotus email, word processing, spreadsheets, unified communication, and social networking software included, to a variety of end-point devices. Virtual printing is also included.

…

When we look back several years from now, I think we’ll see this time as an inflection point when the economic climate pushed the virtual Linux desktop from theory to practice. The financial pressures on organizations are staggering; the management of PCs is unwieldy, and traditional office software innovation is paltry. Today’s virtual desktop is delivering superior collaborative software, an innovative delivery method, and an open-source operating system that is demanding clients’ consideration.

An amazing story of the value the Linux community development process brings to the table in solving user problems. Now that Microsoft knows there’s a problem, their engineers have to spend months identfying where there’s a problem, months identifying who will have to fix the problem and how, and months fixing the issue. Then the issue(s) may have to wait until the next Windows release, or do they roll out in an update.

Either way, the community developing Linux saw the pain point right away a long time ago and built in “green” features that today show up in the stable RHEL kernel. This is just another example of when community based development can outperform because of the open contact with user communities.

For this test, we examined power consumption as a way to judge whether Windows Server 2008 or Linux is, in fact, the ‘greener’ operating system. As the price of power hits record heights, power reduction mechanisms shipping within an operating system should play a key role in you energy conservation plan.

…

The results showed that while Windows Server 2008 drew slightly less power in a few test cases when it had its maximum power saving settings turned on, it was RHEL that did the best job of keeping the power draw in check across the board.

Add in real time Java and you have a fully deterministic stack.

16 percent of all U.S. institutional equity commissions are exposed to latency risk, totaling $2 billion, according to a new report from the TABB Group.

http://www.tabbgroup.com/PublicationDetail.aspx?PublicationID=346

http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/feed/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208400864&cid=RSSfeed_WST_All

You can register here:

https://www-950.ibm.com/events/wwe/grp/grp017.nsf/agenda?openform&seminar=692H5MES&locale=en_US/

Did I mention it only runs Linux?

Ashlee Vance cracks me up – it’s clear from this article he’s been talking to vendors for two long (see the last sentence in this quote):

The system itself is quite remarkable. IBM has reworked its approach to rack servers allowing it to place twice as many systems in a single cabinet. This attack centers on delivering the most horsepower possible in a given area while also reducing power consumption. IBM hopes the iDataPlex unit will attract today’s service providers buying thousands and tens of thousands of servers and also big businesses such as oil and gas firms and media companies that will also possibly pursue a grid-ish data center computing model pioneered to some degree by Google.

But the really awe inspiring bit of iDataPlex comes from the fact that IBM is willing to go after this market at all and that it did so without screwing up the hardware design.

Ars covered the details as well over here:

ComputerWorld

Satyadas said IBM thinks that this year, it will happen. “All the stars are lining up,” he said. “Everybody has been saying that since 2001 except IBM. We never said that, but we are saying that now.”

Matt Asay’s Cnet Blog

It’s easy to overlook IBM’s announcement that its Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony suites will run on Ubuntu. I think this would be a mistake. IBM is not a dumb company. It’s not in the habit of wasting resources. For IBM to be partnering up with Ubuntu says something about the enterprise mindset on Ubuntu.

InformationWeek

By porting key software to Linux, IBM is looking to give businesses one less reason to buy products from rival Microsoft — which IBM said offers “a proprietary desktop model.” IBM’s Linux efforts will “further address customer demands around choice,” said Inna Kuznetsova, an IBM executive with responsibility for Linux, in a statement.

I read this news release with great excitement and will take a shameless opportunity to plug what I think is a fantastic partnership. The news? IBM’s Lotus group has announced support of its Open Collaboration Client Solution (OCCS) for Ubuntu Linux. OCCS is a layer of rich client communications apps including IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 (Calendaring, Email), Sametime 7.x (Instant Messaging), and Symphony (OpenOffice in an Eclipse RCP form). I’ve switched to Ubuntu for my primary system at home for well over a year now and while I took a very short break to dabble in Fedora 8, I’m back on Ubuntu again. I’ve been using a RHEL5 base at work for over a year as well but now that we have Ubuntu support coming, I’ll probably switch to Ubuntu once the OCCS solution is released (yes, I work in a strategy group in IBM and I don’t use Windows or MS Office – and most people can’t tell). The thing about working in IBM is that everyone uses Notes, Sametime, and ODF is even becoming more popular so there’s very little that prevents anyone from using Linux (or a Mac). Heck, many users can probably get away with an iPhone.

IBM also expanded the OCCS platform support with Red Hat EL Desktop and announced more partners around OCCS on Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED).

What makes all this even better? Enterprise applications delivered in a rich client environment. Take for instance SAP, who today announced a joint product set with IBM that will be delivered through Lotus Notes (which we now know runs well on Linux)

The product, codenamed Atlantic, will allow users to access SAP’s Business Suite applications for workflows, reporting and analytics through IBM’s Lotus Notes desktop software.

So the ecosystem and vision is starting to come together. It’s early, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention again that 2008 will be the year of the enterprise Linux client ;-) How many users will we be saying this for? :-) (Note, I didn’t say ‘desktop’ specifically, and I said ‘enterprise’). As we’ve been saying all along, there are certain segments of users that can easily do their work on a Linux client (many won’t even know it’s not Windows). Those companies who take advantage of user segmentation have a lot to benefit from both on pure cost alone, but also in the next round of negotiations on your non-Linux client systems ;-)

Check it out Mike’s comparison here for the details: http://zombieprocess.wordpress.com/2008/01/10/predictive-self-healing-on-linux-on-power/

Sun frequently touts their “predictive self-healing” implementation in Solaris 10. I wonder if that bullet point would be further down the list if they were familiar with the error detection, prediction, and correction capabilities of Linux on POWER platforms. In fact, the Linux on POWER implementation precedes the Solaris 10 implementation by at least a year (Solaris 10 was released in January 2005; SLES 8 had this solution for POWER in 2003, and RHEL 3 had it in 2004 at the latest).

Linux is now heading into another direction focusing on the specific needs for users with very low latency and determinism requirements. This can apply to anything from weapons systems for military applications, to Wall Street customers sell side trading systems, and even to SMS messaging in the telecommunications industry.

And so we’re beginning to see great strides shaping Linux for the needs of these user segments that demand low latency and determinism in both their operating system and applications. Platforms like IBM’s WebSphere Real Time and even Sun’s real time Java are currently running (or in Sun’s case, being ported to run) on a real time Linux operating system. With a real time Java machine, suddenly Java applications can inherit the benefits of a real time system. And so antiquated real time languages are suddenly… antiquated officially because a real time Linux and Java solution can marry a general purpose OS with a general purpose programming language for the best of both worlds. IBM has made great gains in the technology adding both a real time Java garbage collector and Ahead-of-Time compilation to make this a great solution compelling enough for the US Navy’s mission critical weapons systems.

Recently Novell has announced their SLERT product updates with great monitoring tools from Concurrent bundled in (and tighter integration of the kernel community real time patches – now a community standard?). I expect we’ll also soon hear more about Red Hat’s real time plans as well so stay tuned…

It’s been a few years since I last attended and at that time, I don’t believe I even registered – I just popped in, went to a few talks and left. But at that time there were maybe a couple hundred people there. I heard estimates that over 1,000 were in attendance although that figure seemed to underestimate the full number of people there. A couple of the speaker hall sessions were absolutely packed (and they were big halls). Ohio LinuxFest gives LinuxWorld a pretty big challenge. It was great to see all the regional corporate supporters but I was a bit surprised by all the “big IT” vendors with booths. There were sponsors from Google, IBM, HP, Novell, Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Vyatta and even Sun (although they seemed to be using Linux to try getting visitors to listen to their Solaris story).

Some of the sessions were fantastic, others less so but on the whole, it was an outstanding lineup of speakers. “Maddog” was a speaker and did a great talk on computing off the grid. Grega… wow, what energy for usability. Somehow I ended up being an impromptu speaker at an “IBM Virtualization” session. I was followed by Alena from IBM who did a great job covering the details on how NationWide uses Linux on an IBM System z mainframe with z/VM for their mission critical web based systems. Alena had a last minute “laptop issue” (ahem… Windows) but we were able to copy her presentation onto an USB key and present from my Linux laptop (Linux saves the day… again).

The special prize for those who made it was the untold number of great ideas, best practices, and partnering or finding others in similar situations that these networking events create. I actually met someone with a similar background who went to law school and passed the bar, he moved to D.C. as an attorney and he’s now managing IT systems for the federal court systems. He was looking to start consolidating some of the applications they run in every court onto a central system (mainframe most likely).

Anyway, here’s an obligatory picture from the show (apologies for not having my good camera with me). I encourage anyone who will be near Columbus next year to check this event out – it was a great show, a great place to meet others working in the Linux/FLOSS arena, and overall a great time. And somehow this whole event is put on by volunteers – truly amazing.

Note the body density in this picture – this place was packed.

“The affect on sales year over year, for Novell’s first three quarters of our fiscal year, which ends Oct. 31 — our Linux business was up 243%,” said Justin Steinman, director of marketing at Novell, who, along with executives from both companies, spoke at a program hosted by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council.

Oddly this comes out just the day after Red Hat’s earnings which  seem to have impressed investors:

Shares of Red Hat Inc. rose more than 4% Wednesday, one day after the company reported that its second-quarter profit rose 59%, and sales slightly beat Wall Street analysts’

The bottom line conclusion I see in these datapoints is Linux is flying off the shelves (or is that off the wires with downloads…) and growing quite well no matter what other companies try to do to impede its growth. The state of Linux is strong.

Some things I have to write about soon: SystemTap (see LWN), OpenMoko (cool, but guys, the resolution is way to high), OLPC, IBM announcements, Desktop Linux, ODF, OIN and Google, Ubuntu (multiples here), POWER6 benchmarks, LSB thoughts, and more.

On another interesting note, I met Craig of Craigslist fame today.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9029178&source=NLT_PM&nlid=8

August 06, 2007 (Reuters) — Lenovo Group Ltd., the world’s No. 3 PC maker, said today that it will start selling versions of its laptop computers preloaded with Linux software from Novell Inc. instead of Microsoft Corp.‘s Windows operating system.

The laptops are scheduled to go on sale in the fourth quarter of this year and will be sold to Lenovo’s business customers as well as to consumers.

Lenovo announced its plans at the start of LinuxWorld, an annual conference for IT managers that’s being held in San Francisco this week.

“I feel we are being railroaded, and the market generally forced (us) into a corner or even a cul-de-sac. In a free market, we have made Microsoft dominant, and now we have the collective responsibility to reverse this situation to re-establish balance and competition. If I am being driven down the Vista route, then an Apple Mac is smarter money and cheaper.”

I will preface that this meme is about “open source firms” which I assume means companies/profit seekers leveraging open source software as a model to grow – not those who take on the humble task of building free software in a non-commercial intent model (i.e. Apache, Eclipse). Having replied to this meme, I get to name the next round of victims. For that I will now tag Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth, kernel hacker Gerrit Huizenga who participates uniquely with other Linux firms in the community, and finally sogrady’s partner in crime over at Redmonk, Coté. So without further adieu, here’s my quick/dirty 3×3.

3 “Do”s:

1) Do Bring Crisp Customer Value to the Table: Define a value proposition beyond simply relying on being “open source” – there has to be some reason your value proposition is better (i.e. Firms in your industry constantly struggle to integrate X and Y while customizing for individual business units. Our open, modular architecture can be adapted to meet your individual business unit CRM requirements and integrate with X without expensive, lengthy customizations of the entire app) Hitting on a pain point of “closed” alternatives works well too – ask a PBX user how much they love their supplier(s)… turn the pain points (licensing, payment models, etc) into your value prop

2) Do Make Friends, Not Enemies: I once had a _smart*_ once tell me in an opening introductory sentence at an O’Reilly event his job was to use open source to wipe out millions of dollars of IBM’s business until IBM realized they’d have to buy him. That was his first sentence to me ever! – not “Hi, I’m XYZ from ABC, I’d like to find ways to partner with IBM”. The IT business is driven by partnerships, friendships, loyalties, acquaintances, and networking. If you are into open source to make a profit, partner like mad – if you position yourself as the enemy, expect to be killed or worse, ignored and slowly put out to pasture. The person who approached me in that manner is now struggling with the latter issue… I suspect his initial investors won’t hang around long as he still tries to make himself relevant.

3) Do Make the Right Friends – Partner with the Right Partners: The open source firms with a strong management team “get” partnering. They partner with other firms that can enable business and community growth. Just because someone like IBM invests millions in open source communities, Linux, and the community does not mean every open source firm should bet the farm on partnering with IBM. Yes, partnering with IBM has advantages, but IBM can also suck up your precious resources simply navigating the huge array of virtual teams. IBM may also have a differing strategy (and every strategy out of IBM is not necessarily the one that wins in market – you can be different). As an open source firm, your goal is to find the right partners who are naturally aligned for partnering with you. Don’t accept partnerships that have no investment on one side – they’re doomed. Both sides must be aligned and invested. How will your partnership not only create more business for you, but also generate new revenue or reach a new customer base for your partners. I’ve had this discussion with the head a particular open source firm on a few occasions – partnering is by definition mutual – how do we both benefit from partnering? (otherwise, I can’t justify investment and maybe I’m not the right partner for you) Another IBM partner with an open source product just closed another round of investment for ~$25M – they know how to partner in a mutually beneficial model. There will be a lot of news coming in this space…

3 “Do not”s:

1) Do Not Shy Away from Being a Commercial Business – too often companies pitch how “open” they are. While that’s great, how do you make money? It’s as if some open source firms are afraid to discuss how they make money off of free software (free as in speech). This is usually a good way for vendors to weed out the bad firms – if the firm is shy about discussing this, they probably have a weak value prop, and there’s probably more of a “hidden hook” to make customers pay than offer something customers want to pay for. IBM has for a long time been investing substantially in Linux, open standards/source based software, and open source communities – I can’t recall an executive who did not clearly, up-front, and simultaneously articulate how IBM generates revenue from any of those ventures. If you set the tone up front, no one will be surprised or upset later. And if you have a strong value prop – see point 1) – customers will expect your valuable product/service comes at a reasonable price. And one last point is “free as in beer” only gets you one round – downloads do not magically turn into profit later. I don’t care if you have 8M downloads – while that’s great for showing loose interest in your technology, how many are paying you? How many have built a dependency in their applications on your technology? How are you going to generate the revenue needed to fund the next version of your technology?

2) [If you are trying to be the standard as in platform], Do Not Try to Control/Dominate/Dictate an “open” Community Project. I’m not talking about MySQL here – they’re an application/database component. Rather, think about platforms like operating systems, dynamic server languages, portable runtimes, etc. that customers use as platforms to build on. There are many of these succeeding today (RHT, NOVL, PHP, Apache, Eclipse to name just a few). There are others that may have an open source license, but the firm tries to dominate with restrictions and provisions in contributor agreements, including hidden hooks in license terms, or by bundling in non-free (as in speech) components. These firms typically then claim to be leaders and their platform is growing in adoption … yet for some reason… no one partners with them – see point 2) – and they carry the entire development expense with no community-scaling benefits. They invest the R&D and in the end, their “community platform” is just another vendor product that rings well with the vendors existing customers. Consider Eclipse – while it may have started with IBM dominating the “participant list”, it takes a serious approach to vendor-neutrality and open participation for BEA, Oracle, Sybase, Zend, Actuate, Compuware, SAP, CA, and Borland to all join IBM on the Strategic vendors list. The same applies to Linux – look at the Linux Foundation membership list.

3) Do Not Ignore Intellectual Property; Do Not Let Intellectual Property Stifle Your Innovation – First, you cannot ignore the effects and implications of intellectual property decisions. First, there’s the license – not all software must be GPL, but there are serious, practical issues if you decide to create the “XYZ Corp Open Source License v1.0″. License appropriately for the type of developer and user community you’re trying to foster. Second, patents – take a political stance, but don’t get caught staring at the clouds waiting for Congress. File for patents if you can, what you do with them after is up to you, but the Patent Commons, OIN, or some other entity is a great place to house them. Also, don’t be stupid and violate an obviously valid patent. If you’re starting an open source project in a technology area that has established players – hire an attorney to guide you through the minefield. It can be done. Third, figure out the trademark situation. Badgeware is one issue, but not creating a trademarked identity that your “open community” can use in viral marketing and “I’m proud to be an XYZ-user” situations is sheer nonsense. You need to establish legal trademarks, then set clear guidelines for trademark usage up front, make it open, and don’t use your trademark to make people pay you – IMO it’s a poor business practice and creates unnecessary frustration later on. And finally, don’t let IP hold you up. Everyone knows this field is wrought with nonsense and arcane approaches to IP. If you can create value, just hire a reasonable IP attorney to walk you through the field. Take some basic steps to be safe, but don’t spin wheels and tie up valuable resources trying to analyze (or let an attorney make you analyze) every conceivable, possible, extreme angle. IP generally comprises of Patents, Copyrights, Trade Secrets, and Trademarks – use them wisely.

If I had a 4×4 meme, I’d also cover open standards and the importance to lead in driving these open standards as part of your model (see what happened with Spring for instance).

According to BMW, Xen virtualization technology built into SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 will allow the company to increase flexibility in managing server life cycles. BMW will also gain operational and cost advantages in other areas, in addition to having a flatter support structure through the integrated operating system and virtualization layer. Hardware resources can be more efficiently used through server consolidation, and BMW is able to cluster virtual servers and migrate them live from one physical server to another as needed. The company is also currently evaluating Novell ZENworks(R) Orchestrator as a way to manage the resulting virtual data center systems.

The Free Software movement is dead,” Hilf said, in a typical quip, as quoted in “The Bangkok Post.” “Linux doesn’t exist in 2007. Even [Linux creator] Linus [Torvalds] has a job today.”

I’m curious if he was just misquoted, but that does happen. Obviously that was a terribly poor judgment as the free software movement is most certainly alive and well, and there are more people working on Linux than just IBM, Oracle, and Canonical. Bill, take a look at who really contributed to the 2.6.20 kernel Bill - there are many contributors (nearly 2,000 had code accepted just into the 2.6.20 kernel). The free software ecosystem is actually growing further – and many of the participants are Microsoft’s own long time partners. And yes, many of them do make a living (it’s hard to code Linux kernel code while wandering and asking for money on the streets). That is actually Microsoft’s real problem – these guys (and gals) are making a living – it’s an economically self-sustaining model. Sure, they are not making $92M/day like others, but they make a living and enjoy what they do.

Maybe that’s what has Microsoft so afraid that they’re reverting to their usual tricks (e.g. not competing on technology). After all, there used to be a huge force of Wintel+Dell, but even that partnership has changed…

Consider this: Google, IBM, HP, Dell, Intel, AMD, Novell, Red Hat, Oracle, Sun, SAP, Accenture, China, India, Ingram Micro, Tech Data, Avnet, vast numbers of global and local resellers, consultants, ISVs, and system integrators are all making vast fortunes for their shareholders off of Linux. Will the industry just let FUD tricks stand in their way??? Heck no, this industry invented FUD and certainly knows how to defeat it.

The real problem is that the industry is already defeating it. The MS monopoly is under attack from all sides: ODF, Linux Desktop, Linux server, Adobe RIA, Eclipse RCP, etc, etc and I see these latest threats as last resort efforts from a company clearly concerned about its long term growth. That’s a natural response, but another way to compete is to just fix your products and deliver something your customers want.

This is an interesting second annual run of the “race to Linux” that challenges developers to take .NET applications and get them up and running on Linux (in the shortest time). It involved 3 rounds with 3 different .NET applications. There were 5 winners (all listed on the site). The cool technology in play here is Mainsoft’s “Grasshopper” (or the product version called Visual MainWin for J2EE) which is a plug-in for Visual Studio .NET that let’s you take a .NET application and export it seamlessly as a native bytecode J2EE application. Behind the scenes, Grasshopper takes .NET code, compiles it into intermediate bytecode, then translates the .NET intermediate byte code to J2EE bytecode, and then pushes the JAR/WAR bits out to your J2EE app server. Of course the developer barely knows what happening, but Mainsoft does this in the background when you use the VS publish features.

So for instance, you can now run your .NET applications within Apache Geronimo right alongside your Java apps… how cool is that?

Anyway, to see how they did it check out the website (not all of the winners used Mainsoft – mono and PHP are in there too).

At LinuxWorld Scott Handy talked about consolidating 8 racks of LAMP servers onto a single rack of IBM System p 560Q servers. This is a new server update targeted specifically at consolidating Linux workloads… doesn’t sound very “UNIX-y” does it? It’s the UNIX+Linux platform. Or UNIX+GNU/Linux for those who like details ;-)

IBM also announced something revolutionary on Monday that goes even further. Transitive was once in the headlines for developing a product Apple OEM’d called Rosetta. Rosetta was the “magic” that allowed Apple to run Mac application binaries for PowerPC on the new Mac products with Intel chips. Rosetta was great b/c the user had no clue what chip the apps were written for – Rosetta did all the work under the covers. No assembly required!

IBM has OEM’d a similar product that essentially does the reverse – takes x86 Linux apps and runs them unmodified on POWER based servers (PowerPC, Power5). Yeah we have over 2,800 native Linux on POWER apps, but every IT shop has unique apps the like – and compiling or porting just is not always feasible.

Anyway, the product lacks a cool name like Rosetta and is instead called System p Application Virtual Environment for x86 Linux (p AVE). This new technology let’s most (lawyers never let you say all) x86 Linux applications on a POWER server running Linux – unmodified, no compiling, just copy/paste/or even just install using the same steps for an Intel system. Any System p user can download p AVE and test it out – there’s an open beta.

At the recent Linux on Wall St. event we actually found out Transitive has p AVE running on Linux on a PS3 – how cool is that? They were actually running Windows apps under Wine, running on pAVE on Yellow Dog Linux on a Cell (POWER architecture) processor. Makes your head spin, but it’s cool to see.

Anyway, if you have a POWER server, a PS3, or even a PowerPC based Mac from the days of old, download pAVE and try it out. Remember, any computer with POWER runs UNIX and Linux (oops, GNU/Linux). If you have any questions on how to setup or use pAVE, check out the free Redpaper.