Someone called my office this morning. he was offering “training” for my crew. i asked what kind of training, and he started to rattle off the usual suspects: MSCE, Novell++, whatever. I told him we are an open source shop, and I could hear him turn the page and say “you mean, like Linux?” Yes, like Linux. He then told me that he has Red Hat training courses for both 7.0 and 7.2

Heh. 1998 called, they want their distro back.

I then told him “well, we have some pretty smart cookies here. Not to sound arrogant, but I bet my engineers are smarter than your trainers.” He responded that yes, I was arrogant. A salesman told me, his potential customer, that I was arrogant.

I went ahead and confirmed his suspicions by hanging up.

Open Source training, unfortunately, is still an afterthought for many of the large training companies out there. The only people I would really trust to teach the RHEL certification is Red Hat. This kinda puts them in the catbird’s seat, and keeps prices high– too bad. The best thing I think Red Hat and Novell could do would be to (forgive me MLK) ‘flood the classrooms’ with RHEL and/or Linux sysadmins. Any sysadmin worth his salt now can administer Linux boxes. But I am talking about all those secondary people: desktop supports, junior sysadmins, floor managers, mail admins, and all their pointy-haired bosses. Never ignore the power of a technically-exposed PHB. Yes, they get in the mix sometimes when you’re trying to make a decision, but generally they are a Force For Good when it comes to budget time, and explaining your hardware/software stack to the rest of the executives.

Red Hat: make training (almost) free, and watch your martketshare skyrocket.

Well, the Novell spin machine is trying to pedal, but they’re not pedalling fast enough. First we saw the Novell brass say they were duped. Then we saw them go to the masses with an IRC press conference. Now we’re seeing the justifications– Novell knew what they were doing the whole time, or something.

Well, as I learned in Film School, the message is in the media. It’s not what Novell is saying anymore, only that the story/angle/spin is changing so rapidly, like a teenager trying to esplain the beer cans found in the back of the family car to his father on Sunday morning. Meanwhile, Ubuntu has gone ahead and published that open letter I thought that Red Hat should. The community seems to be divorcing themselves from Novell, either overtly with RMS-type declarations, or quietly and discreetly by ‘just not buying’ the SLED10 installs that Novell was hoping for.

Pedal faster, Novell. Death by 10,000 ant bites is not a pretty way to go.

I just watched a video of the OLPC Interface, and I think they may have made some poor assumptions here at the start. For those who haven’t heard of it, the One Laptop Per Child project is a very aggressive idea intended to close the knowledge gap between the first and third worlds. Basically, governments can buy thousands of hand-crank-powered laptops and distribute them to kids in all the villages around the world. I applaud this project sincerely, but think they may have some core assumptions wrong in the details of the interface.

To wit:

• The icons along the bottom are simple, which is good, but some of them may assume western concepts: chat is represented by a cartoon talking baloon. Is it that way everywhere?
• To save a file (like in the wordprocessor), the child would click on a little icon that looks like a 3.5″ floppy disk. Who has seen one of those in the last 6 years?
• The web icon is a little globe– there’s that damned ‘wolrd wide web’ metaphor showing up again. Even Tim Berners-Lee regrets this metaphor. I guess we should be thankful it’s not a little spider. What is the most simple and universal icon that says “search for information”? It’s not a magnifying glass– that’s left over from Sherlock Holmes…

Perhaps the solution here is to open up the icon set for adaptation culture-by-culture. That would certainly be fitting in with the Open Source model, save on labour, and allow each group to get the best icons/interface going for them. Who knows? A gecko might be associated with ‘searching’ in some parts of New Guinea. Moreover, it gives the Cultural Minister something to do.

Well, things continue to look sour for Novell. The Samba project has just declared that they “disapprove strongly” of the Novell deal with Microsoft. We all know that the Linux community is very very skiddish to start with, and now Samba seems to be putting some teeth into that disapproval.

I would expect Mozilla, Evolution, AbiWord, and other major projects to declare their distrust very soon, if only to appear on the right side of history. This is going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: noone will trust the Novell deal, so therefore noone will deal with Novell, which only further erodes the trust and interoperability. Novell’s Linux days are numbered. And if Novell’s Linux days are numbered, then, well, Novell’s days are numbered.

Microsoft seems to be following a classic Klauswitz strategy: pick off the weakest members of an alliance, and instill fear throughout, which will make all allies retreat into themselves (and disolve the collective strength of the alliance). Novell is that weakest member: Mandiva is too small to matter, Red Hat is too zealous and big to try, and Ubuntu is too much on the desktop and not servers (where it counts). Novell, on the other hand, is known for its Intellectual Property foibles, desparate for cash, and known to ‘bend the spirit’ of the GPL. Microsoft gains a whole round of questions among CIOs and CTOs when considering Linux, and that gives them a shot in an otherwise losing battle.

Well, it looks like the hate and fear has begun. Sysadmins are starting their exodus from Novell SuSE.

Granted, Slashdot is not usually the most rational group of actors, but it certainly is the most commonly read board among all Linux users. I can imagine, and I have heard directly, that the Linux developers down in Orem are certainly thinking long and hard on this one. I would imagine that as soon as one or two of them go, then Pharoh’s control will start to slip very very quickly.

Let my penguins go!