Kennon’s Space

Rolled back into town from GWAVACon San Diego last night around 10:30pm. Overall the trip was worth it. Even though Gwava is closed source (for now) they do have some really powerful tools for GroupWise. I might be able to cobble together a lot of similar functionality using FOSS but it would be a full time job for a year or more to do so and I just don’t care about spam blocking THAT much. I block 75% of incoming spam with Postfix already and only pass about 25% of the load back to the GroupWise/Gwava system today anyway but Gwava does add a lot of nice interface and customization features to the whole ordeal. We’ve also recently purchased a few other items from them that I am sure will help us get on track with some compliance and retention issues we have in our current messaging environment.

So the highlight of the conference was getting to personally meet Ron Hovsepian the CEO of Novell. Immediately after his keynote I jetted to the bathroom out of the back of the room while everyone else stuck around to participate in some prize drawings. As I was coming out of the restroom he was standing right there in front of the door with Ken Muir of Novell and Gregory Bell from Advansys. I just kind of hung back until he and Mr. Bell were done talking then I shook his hand and introduced myself. First thing out of his mouth after looking at my name tag was “Hey a fellow Armo” which was pretty cool. He seemed like a good guy and although we only talked for about a minute I got a pretty good vibe from the guy. The only real question I asked him was when he was going to open source GroupWise. He put his hand on my shoulder and leaned in closer and said in a low tone of voice how difficult it would be to clean up the GroupWise code but they were working on putting something together in conjunction with their Teaming and Conferencing product which is based on FOSS code called Ice Core. He told me they were working on it. Well normally I am a pretty jaded fellow but maybe I am predisposed to believe him because of the whole star factor the guy has but he seemed sincere to me.

My argument for freeing GroupWise is pretty straight forward. Right now there is no product on Linux that can touch the power and utility of a properly configured and managed GroupWise system period. It is the most secure and scalable messaging platform in the world. I know this from professional experience. I met people at the show who were running the latest released version of the product on 5-7 year old hardware that was supporting 500+ users on each box. Try that with the latest version of Exchange, or even the previous version of Exchange, or Notes, or any other messaging system you can think of. I predict that if GroupWise was freed Novell would see at least a threefold growth of sales, and a tenfold growth in worldwide user base. Yes, a lot of small shops and home offices would run the free version and not pay Novell a dime for it. But the loss of revenues from those sites would be minuscule in comparison to the exposure to GroupWise the world at large would receive. The pool of trained labor (admins with experience in GroupWise) would expand dramatically. All of this would be only good for Novell. Would it take time and effort to “clean up” the code? Of course it would. But if Sun can free an entire operating system from proprietary hooks in a couple years then I think with a little effort and investment Novell could free an email system. I know a ton of people today who are running Solaris now on little home boxes and learning it who would never have bothered if it was still closed. In 2 years or so the number of people who have experience in Solaris will be triple what it is today. It would be 100x’s that if Sun had freed Solaris 3-5 years ago. Right now there are some pretty promising FOSS messaging and collaboration products for Linux on the horizon. If Novell waits too long they will not have nearly the impact they would making it happen now. If GroupWise was unleashed on the Linux world in 2008 I think it would become the defacto standard for messaging and collaboration in the shops with Linux in the datacenter.

Anyway, overall I felt like the GWAVACon 08 was a worthy use of my time and I got a lot out of it. Even though I was a little disenchanted by one of the keynotes, as mentioned in the previous post, here a couple days later someone points out to me that he is in marketing and I shouldn’t be too upset by his ignorance on the subject. It just shows that there is still a lot of work to be done to show the world that their 1995 IBM/Microsoft/Novell view of software is dead. Some old guard companies have realized this to some extent, IBM, HP, Novell, Citrix, and some have realized this fully like Sun, Red Hat, Canonocial and some seem determined to fight the waters of change with their every breath like Oracle and Microsoft to name a couple.

EOL

So I am in San Diego early this week at a vendor conference called GWAVACon. GWAVA is a pretty great anti-virus anti-spam product that we use to secure our Linux based GroupWise system. Day 1 was awesome. It was about 6 hours of Gwava4 training and I learned a lot. Here I am in Day 2 and it kind of took a downward turn. Richard Bliss the VP of Marketing gave his keynote just before lunch and it was really disturbing. Here is a company whose bread and butter is GroupWise and he spent the whole second half of his speech talking about Monkeys, Chimps and Gorillas, Novell’s place in the world. It started out fine I suppose until he made some comments that revealed him for the clueless noob he is. My favorite one was when he started talking about the Linux community and described them as mostly still living in their mom’s basement. He was trying to come up with some crap about Novell owning a word (figuratively). He said that the word Linux was already owned by Red Hat. But the version of that word that Red Hat owned was the .org version not the .com version. That Novell needed to own the word (phrase?) “Business Linux”. He said that we would give the community (most of which still lives in their mom’s basement) to Red Hat and that Novell would take the business meaning of the word…I can’t begin to describe to you how odd this struck me. I suppose I can’t really expect anything more though from someone who doesn’t even understand what Free software is. He said it was low cost…So here is my open letter to Richard Bliss in response to his keynote at GWAVACon 2008 and his recent blog postings. Keep in mind this was written in the heat of the moment. I am sure that in a few hours I will come back and read this and chuckle to myself. But right now I am kind of upset that here, in 2008 I have to deal with this misconceptions that we have been disproving in the FOSS business world for the last 5-10 years:

Dear Mr. Bliss,

I just got done sitting through your keynote at gwavacon in San Diego where you reiterated all this monkey business. Your speech was fine for a bunch of 40-something ex-Netware (or soon to be ex) admins. But it is painfully obvious that you don’t understand the way the world is changing. You spoke about Linux but it is plain that you don’t even understand what Free software is. You are still one of those people who think that it means dope smoking hippies giving away the farm for the good of mankind. Your keynote was something out of 1999. I cringed in pain when you said “We are giving the community to Red Hat”. You spoke as if the community and the business were two different things that could somehow be separated. Which really means to me that you don’t understand the first thing about Free and Open Source Software. When you say free you mean as in beer. Without the community, you have no business. You have nothing.

Doesn’t it seem strange to you that Red Hat as a company makes more money per year than Novell when Novell has about a zillion more products that Red Hat does?* Novell has decades in the business and a software portfolio that if implemented fully could fork lift replace almost every Microsoft application from a data center and Red Hat has a fraction of that and yet somehow Red Hat is bigger than Novell? And did I mention that Red Hat ONLY sells Open Source software. Not a line of proprietary code in the shop. How could this be? I sincerely appreciate the disclaimer at the end when you said that you cannot make decisions for Novell. When you said that I thought, thank God, to myself. Novell’s only hope of surviving the next 5 years is to realize the same thing Sun, IBM, and HP are realizing. Free your code or die.

*I realized that I worded this poorly. Novell’s annual total revenue is more than Red Hat (for now), but Red Hat has a larger market cap and makes it’s revenue from Open Source software. Whereas 90% of Novell’s products are still proprietary.