John Dragoon’s Blog

BrainShare is coming up fast. This time of year is extremely hectic at Novell as more and more of our attention starts to focus on the big event. Throughout Novell’s various campuses and organizations, Novell personnel anticipate BrainShare with a kind of excitement that seems to become more and more tangible as the event’s first day draws closer.  Certainly, I share that anticipation with my colleagues–in fact we began planning for BrainShare the day after last year’s event was over.

Our BrainShare attendees are a fantastic collection of systems administrators and IT managers who are extremely serious about the technology that Novell provides to them and their organizations.  Passion for technology is never stronger than when it’s the technology that you have built your reputation and career upon.  Last year, I spent a good amount of time hanging out with our customers and listening to their creative ideas, imminent concerns, and constructive criticisms.  They’re a fun, passionate (and opinionated) group, and I’m setting my sights to ensure that BrainShare 2007 will knock their socks off with great Novell technology, our wealth of partners, and Novell’s force of technologists, hackers, architects and other visionaries.

From my view, the whole tone of the conference is set by the general sessions. The general sessions are where the biggest stuff is supposed to happen. So what we put up there on the main stage is extremely important to me. This year, I have asked two trusted hands (Ted Haeger and Clint Carroll) to plan out a great show for the BrainShare 2007 general sessions.  From what they have put before me, here are a couple things I can tell you might see on Monday. We’re opening up the demos this year immediately after CEO Ron Hovsepian’s address, and the first item up is Open Enterprise Server 2. Our audience has invested a long standing loyalty to NetWare, so what better way to thank them than to show them the outstanding achievements the engineers have made for both the Linux and NetWare flavors of Open Enterprise Server? You’ll see Data Center management with ZENworks Orchestrator and see what’s new in SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, too.Of course, there are two other days as well, and those will stock more ZENworks, Identity Manager, Sentinel, GroupWise, and many other great products from the Novell portfolio. You’ll also see some of the Windows interoperability work our teams have been working on. I would detail more, but really you just have to be there and experience it live.

With this glimpse into our plans, as well as providing some of my thoughts on the BrainShare general sessions, how about you provide me some of yours? What’s your burning great idea for the BrainShare general sessions this year? And, what other BrainShare topics would you like us to discuss.

I look forward to your feedback and perhaps seeing you in person in Salt Lake City between March 18 to March 23.  Still time to register and all are welcome!

John

You don’t have to be a carpenter to know that it’s a lot harder to fix a mistake once the cut has been made.  Hence true craftsman know all to well that proper due dilgence up front can save a lot of heartache down the road.

And so it is with reacting – or over reacting – to every story, rumor, or misrepresentation about the direction of GPL3 – the work in process update to the GNU General Public License version 2 that governs the use and distribution of some open source software.  As GPLv3 is a work in process, we don’t speculate on its outcome.  Others do, however, including a Reuters report yesterday that intimated dire consequences for Novell – citing Eben Moglen, the Free Softwware Foundation’s general counsel as the source of this conclusion.

Within hours, Mr. Moglen himself, in an email interview with Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Linux-Watch, clarified his position and the Reuter’s story stating,  “The actual quote he prints is entirely accurate, but his lede destroys the context and is making unnecessary waves.”  In fact Mr. Vaughan-Nichols has a number of balanced views and articles on this topic that provide a fuller context for many of us to “measure twice and cut once” on this issue.  On his site you’ll also find an interesting guest post by Bill Weinberg, a long time evangalist on open source licensing to business users, that’s worth a read.

On this issue as with so many others, it’s a good idea to take out your tape measure and use a pencil.

John

One million is still a big number….at least where I come from.

Yesterday, one unsuspecting customer joined the growing ranks of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 enthusiasts and downloaded the millionth copy of our award winning distribution. This historic milestone occurred a little over 6 months from our launch last July, marking the fastest time to a million downloads of any Novell product ever. Yes ever.

The credit for this success is broad and well deserved. First in line is the community of developers and open source experts who contributed to the foundation of SUSE Linux via our openSUSE project and other efforts. Next is our committed Novell engineers, product managers, field personnel and partners. Last but by no means least are the million plus individuals who took the time to investigate the possibilities of low cost and enterprise ready server and desktop operating systems based on SUSE Linux.

I’ll be accused of being a cheerleader on this one. Guilty as charged. I’m proud of this milestone and look forward to the next one….stay tuned.

John