Novell to Ship MySQL With NetWare 6

An anonymous reader writes "Coming close on the heels of their announcement that they've ported PostgreSQL to NetWare, Novell announced today that they will begin shipping MySQL with NetWare 6. Owing to customer and partner doubts about the GPL, Novell has chosen the commercial version of MySQL, rather than the GPL'ed version."

Shipping both?

[mgkimsal2]

Were they going to ship both, or only ship mysql, and have postgres as a 'supported' but not 'shipped' system?

Novell needs better marketing

[Charlton Heston]

I dislike marketers as much as any programmer, or for that matter, anyone who's had their dinner interrupted by a phone call. But Novell needs better marketing in general. They've got really neat technology, but nobody knows about it. I think that if Novell discovered cold fusion they wouldn't tell anyone. The most they'd do is but a little paper sign on the door of the laboratory saying "cold fusion inside - don't tell anyone."

So, without the proper marketing, I doubt anyone will ever discover that Novell can be a web services platform, or that there's a built-in database that's ready to use.

Re:A question from the ignorant

[mmacdona86]

This is not really a big issue one way or the other for the GPL. MySQL is available with a GPL license, for use in GPL applications, or with a different license for non-GPL applications. Novell thought that some of their customers might want to build a non-GPL applications with MySQL and Netware, so they gave them that option by supplying the non-GPL license for MySQL. I mean, this makes sense; I would think that adding MySQL with the GPL license to Netware isn't much of a value add.

Re:So what's new (and a Novell is dying troll, too

[Tablizer]

(* People have cried the Novell is dead/dying mantra since the release of NT 4.0 yet, their still plugging along. Don't count them dead yet. *)

Novell is the Apple of Networking. (Well, except for their esthetically ugly screens.)

Too many companies rely on them. Their cash cow may shrink, but will probably never die any more than 360-based mainframes will. At worse, another company will purchase them (IBM? Computer Associates? Some European tech company?)

If Wall Street hates Novell that much, then perhaps I'll purchase some stock...........wait, I have no money for stock purchases due to the last stock poppage and sour tech econ. Bummer.

Re:So what's new (and a Novell is dying troll, too

[IAgreeWithThisPost]

Novell is dead..I was a long time Novell homer....hated NT when it came out..Thought 4.x trounced it every which way..but i realized eventually that Novell was losing quickly..I trashed all netware servers and went 2000.

AD isn't quite NDS, but it works fine..better than what NT offered..and the group policies, when done correctly, are sensational. Tied in with GP software installation and RIS(again, when done correctly), and you can have your shop running smooth as a baby's ass. The biggest problem is having to repackage products for wininstaller..obviously not as many companies are jumping on board as MS had hoped..but it's not a difficult thing, if you do your homework;learn the msi format...too many idiots try and just use the repackaging software and think that's all there is too it.

it puts zenworks to shame that's for sure. and whatever happened with novell's big push to have a java gui(that was slow as molasses). they've failed every way they could, and you can't make mistakes against a powerhouse like MS.

Re:What version? free software vs. commercial soft

[d3xt3r]

Here lies the differentiation between free software and commercial software. Free software isn't release or production quality until the software developers feel that it is 100% stable. Commercial software is production quanity when the big boss says it's time to make more money with another release.

For example, Win2K was released with 100,000 known bugs. Apache Software Foundation was running their website w/Apache 2.0 beta for over a year before the code went "gold". This is the fundamental difference. Just b/c Microsoft calls it SQL Server 2000 doesn't mean it's gold code.

This is because Oracle for Netware is gone?

[kirkb]

For years, Novell Netware included a copy of Oracle. Didn't Oracle recently announce that they aren't porting to Netware anymore? That's probably the only reason that Novell has moved to support MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Or a reforming troll.

[Soko]

Actually, let me make an educated guess here.

I think they've seen the writing in the wall as far as NetWare goes, and are thinking of taking the best parts of it and porting those parts to Linux. This story [eweek.com] on E-Week shows that they've re-organised thier engineering units to make a "Cross Platform" group with Linux as a specific target. MySQL on NetWare may be the first step in a wholesale change at Novell.

If they can pulll this off, they'll survive - quit nicely too, I think. Dunno if I'd mortgage the house to buy thier stock, but they seem a survivor in the IT world.

Soko

Re:This is neat-o keen, but.

[kelzer]

If I were Novell, I'd be more interested in developing a Samba-style SMB server NLM to try to replace NT file and print servers

I've heard a lot of people making that suggestion, including members of the Samba team. The problem is that NetWare's file services are superior to NT's, so Novell isn't so anxious to emulate an NT server.

For example, NetWare has their "salvage" capability, in which deleted files can be restored. It's so powerful that it's been called "poor man's version control." Note for those who are security consious: the deleted files keep the same ACL they had before deletion, so they are never recoverable by somebody who didn't have rights to read them before they were deleted. Furthermore, individual files can be flagged as "purge immediate", and directories can be as well. Finally, the entire feature can be disabled.

Another advantage of NetWare file services is inherited rights, and the inherited rights filter. "Inherited rights" means that if you have a 50 GB disk that's got 175,000 files on it, and you want to grant one person read-rights to every file on the disk, you just grant them the read-right to the root, and you're done. Unlike NT, you don't have to wait 15 minutes for the rights to propagate through the entire filesystem. And if there's a branch of the directory tree that you don't ever want rights to flow into, you can add an inherited rights filter to prevent this from happening.

NetWare drivers also tend to be much more intelligent when copying files across the network. With NT, if you open up a folder that's on a server across the WAN, and copy a bunch of files to another folder on the same server, NT tends to pull the files across the WAN to your workstation, then send them back to the original server. Novell's been aware of and avoided this issue since the mid 1980's, when they first built NCOPY.EXE to avoid the problem in DOS.

If they implemented Samba, they'd lose some of their perceived technical advantage over NT, and they can't really afford to lose what little advantage they have.

Re:License Fees

[Alarion]

Yes, and MSSQL and Oracle(and others) offer many many more features, mostly ones that are needed in mission-critical situations.

In all honestly, while I like MySQL - and use it extensively, it really isn't worth more than maybe $99/license, IMO.

With MySQL's notoriety for random table file coruptions, lack of stored procs/triggers, lack of a transaction log that can be used to re-perform lost transactions, etc MySQL should not be used in any sort of enterprise class situation. Save for maybe prototyping systems that will be developed to a Oracle, Sybase, Postgres, etc.

This is an odd thing...

[circusnews]

There are some very good reasons to use Novell, and there are some very good reasons not to use it, but the availability of MySQL as a reason either way just seems odd.

There is (and has been for a while now) a MySQL NLM for Netware that is under the GPL (sorry, I can't find the URL at the moment) and I recall seeing a PostgreSQL NLM on a 4.11 server a while back as well. While I applaud Novell for adding MySQL as a part of there base package, as it adds some additional out-of-the-box functionality, I don't see this making a dent in there slow decline.

Now, Novell does have some VERY interesting tech, but they don't sell it well, they never have. Lets take GroupWise as an example. It could be an Outlook Killer. It has just about all of the features of Outlook (and Exchange), and in many a better product. However, they don't push it, and they don't encourage people to try new things with it. I would LOVE to see them take a really bold step and release a version of that in the same way Sun did Star Office (OK, like Sun but without all the associated problems...). OOo plus Groupwise plus an easy to use SQL database front end would be a real alternitive to M$. It would also shine a bright light on Novell for a long time, one that could then be used to help them grow again if they played their cards right.

Re:No choice about the license.

[WilliamX]

Because that is a contradiction. If the software is free, then you can't then turn around and try to control HOW it is used. The two requirements would be mutually exclusive.

The fact is that software DOES cost money to produce, but that doesn't mean that the best way to profit from it is by selling it only as a commercial non-free product. I believe that MySQL does profit from its commercial support services, for those who need that service, or use it as a means of supporting the product. The problem I have is only that I feel that the licensing explantion is deliberately deceptive, and that it reflects poorly on them.

It is not anything new there, it has been this way ever since they become GPL. The text describing the licensing is almost identical to the text describing their non-open source licensing prior to becoming GPL, except they replace non-commercial use with GPL in the text.

If you want to release a product and require a commercial license to use it, then release it under that commercial license, but don't try to also claim that it is GPL, and that you can't use the GPL license if you are using it commercially. The GPL license allows no such exemption, nor should it.

Re:What version? free software vs. commercial soft

[ttfkam]

And if they're not 100% sure, why are they touting it? For the same reason that commercial companies release before it's time: mindshare.

Yes, we know that an open beta from Apache is as good or better than an initial release from a commercial developer. We know that the stable releases from Apache are akin to the third (or so) patch release for a commercial product.

What's the difference? Quality? Not necessarily. The difference is in semantics. Some open source entities produce bad code (have you looked around on Freshmeat lately?) and some commercial software houses produce good code.

How can we tell which is better? Cutting the crap and testing the products in question. If having the source available is important to you, obviously the open source software will win out every time. If only package functionality matters to you, waving a banner won't determine the best choice.

As far as "gold" code, you're wrong. "Gold" code simply means that it's going to be released. It designates that a particular snapshot of the codebase is being burned onto CDs and put into a shrinkwrapped package. "Gold" refers to a baseline, not the quality of the baseline. If you replaced "gold" with "good", I'd agree with you.