Lots of peo­ple, when they heard of this merg­er, start­ed think­ing like this:

Ok, so Nov­ell bought Ximi­an. Ximi­an is a GNOME com­pa­ny. They al­so bought Suse. Suse is a dis­tro. Er­go, Suse will be­come a Ximi­an-ori­ent­ed dis­tro.

Well, that makes some sense. But they seem to be for­get­ting of a change that should hap­pen much soon­er, be­cause it:

1. Is eas­i­er to do

2. Makes more sense

3. Costs less mon­ey

What change? Well, the changes that Ximi­an will have to face for now be­ing part of a com­pa­ny that owns a dsitro!

Let´s look at Ximi­an´s prod­uct­s:

• Xim­i­an con­nec­­tor: I don´t see this chang­ing, ex­­cept for they adding a group­­wise con­nec­­tor.

• Evo­lu­­tion: I can see Nov­ell push­ing Evo­lu­­tion as a Group­­wise clien­t, for ex­am­­ple. So, this has some legs. I don´t see it be­­com­ing a ma­jor rev­enue source for Nov­el­l, though, so it´s not go­ing to get a large push.

• Gnu­mer­ic: I see an axe in its fu­­ture. Nov­ell is not in the spread­­sheet busi­­ness. They owned Quat­tro Pro on­ce, did­n´t they?

• Red Car­pet. I have heard Nov­ell re­al­­ly wan­t­ed this. They have Zen­­Work­s, I sup­­pose some in­­te­­gra­­tion is in or­der, and this will be pro­­duc­­tized. How­ev­er, I don´t think Nov­ell will want to push it as a soft­­ware dis­­tri­bu­­tion mech­a­nism for their com­pe­ti­­tion, at least not while it´s free. If they did, Nov­ell will be giv­ing away what they bought. My guess? It will lose sup­­port for Red Hat, and will be­­come more and more pro­pri­e­tary as time pass­es.

• Xim­i­an set­up tool­s: I am doubt­ing be­tween the axe and pro­pri­e­tary lock­­­down. Why would Nov­ell want to sup­­port con­­fig­u­ra­­tion tools for their com­pe­ti­­tion? On the oth­­er hand, YaST is bet­ter for their own pro­­duc­t, so why keep this at al­l?

• Mono: I can see they wan­t­ing this for their own tool de­vel­op­­men­t, and to make a push in­­­to the de­vel­op­­ment tool mar­ket, but Nov­ell has re­al­­ly no foothold there. So, while they will keep itr and push it, it´s not ex­ac­t­­ly a guar­an­­teed suc­cess (then again, noth­ing is).

• Xim­i­an Gnome: I have no idea.

Al­so, pol­ish­ing the crys­tall ball a lit­tle, if Nov­ell has some cash­flow prob­lems in the next year, they will fo­cus hard­er in what they re­al­ly care about.

My guess is set­up tools will be­come SuSE-on­ly or SuSE-­first, Red Car­pet will be ab­sorbed or re­brand­ed in­to Zen­Works or some­thing, Mono will be mar­ket­ed as .NET plat­for for Lin­ux as soon as they get Forms work­ing, the rest will be "lib­er­at­ed" fe­do­ra-style.

Now, let´s put a re­minder to read this again in 2005 ;-)

Nice ar­ti­cle by Robin Miller at News­forge.

I agree with most of it, ex­cept for one thing.

The au­thor says "I al­ways con­sid­ered the "scratch your own itch" hack­er ethos an es­sen­tial­ly mas­tur­ba­to­ry thing. It would be like me writ­ing ar­ti­cles I want to read in­stead of ar­ti­cles I think you want to read­."

Well, Robin, ar­ti­cles and code are ex­treme­ly dif­fer­ent things. For one thing, ar­ti­cles are 100% use­les for the au­thor, un­less some­one else reads them, whicle code can be 100% use­ful for the au­thor even if noone else has tried it.

I would say it´s like com­par­ing ap­ples and or­anges, ex­cep­t... well, both are fruits and we com­pare them when­ev­er we choose what fruit to buy. This is a less com­pa­ra­ble pair.

For ex­am­ple, I am prob­a­bly the on­ly us­er of KRsN in the world. But it is use­ful for me. It saves me al­most an hour a day, so I wrote it.

On the oth­er hand, I will con­tra­dict my­self: ar­ti­cles al­most noone reads (like this one ;-) are use­ful for shap­ing one´s mind, al­though that´s not a fre­quent goal.

On the grip­ping hand[1], mas­tur­ba­tion is good, dude. Don´t slam it un­less you have nev­er done it. And if you have nev­er done it, don´t slam what you don´t know ;-)

In fac­t, pro­gram­ming be­cause it itch­es is... well, it´s like scratch­ing. It may even be bad for you, but don´t tell me it does­n´t feel good.

[1] One geek cred­it to the one who catch­es the ref­er­ence.

Ok, noone will both­er, but you can lis­ten to me speak­ing about KDE in a Lin­ux event last year, in Ogg For­mat, in span­ish.

I just ran in­to this by googling for my name :-)

It is the first time I like the way my voice sounds in a record­ing, too.

A Lin­ux dis­tro in my USB key­chain. I will do a write­up on it in a day or two, prob­a­bly, since the plan to work less is work­ing (tues­days and thurs­days off al­ready :-)

Just to see if any­one can fig­ure this out:

How do you in­stall Lin­ux on a box with the fol­low­ing hand­i­cap­s:

• No eth­er­net (or to­ken ring or ar­c­net, etc)

• No CD (or DVD)

• A pcm­­cia flop­py that has no Lin­ux driv­er

• No oth­­er OS in­­stalled

• You can't add any hard­ware

• You can't move the HD to an­oth­er box or open the box at al­l.

• It must be a re­al dis­­tro, like Red Hat, SuSE or De­bian, not a toy or flop­py dis­­tro.

• Avail­able hard­ware in the box: key­board, mouse, se­ri­al port, par­al­lel port, mon­i­­tor, a toshi­­ba li­bret­­to flop­py drive (as­­sume it does­n't work with lin­ux, yes, I know there's a "driver", if you can make it work, I want a copy ;-)

• Use of an­oth­er PC with what­ev­er soft­­ware or hard­ware you want is al­lowed, ex­­cept the soft­­ware must all be Lin­ux (no DOS flop­pies or stuff like that)

• Any ca­bles you want can be used.

• Any me­­dia you want can be used for the in­­stal­l.

I will give the an­swer in a week, hope­ful­ly some­one will an­swer first.

Yes, it can be done. In fac­t, I have al­ready done it, a while ago (see the "S­mall Lin­ux" ar­ti­cle in ths very site)