Love: Novell could have had it all

Ransom Love's Linux ideas have come full circle -- twice in the space of one month.

Love began his Linux career by leaving Novell to help found Linux seller Caldera in 1994. As chief executive officer, he took the company down a path that forsook its Linux business in favour of Unix. But Love left in 2002, before the company renamed itself SCO Group and launched a legal attack on IBM and the open-source operating system.

Nine years after rejecting Love's idea, Novell concluded that it wants to be a Linux company after all, announcing a plan to acquire second-place SuSE Linux for $210m. And Love himself has returned to the Linux camp, joining the board of directors of Progeny, which sells a customisable operating system product based on the Debian version of Linux.

"It's deja vu," said Love, chuckling over the recent turns of events. Love shared his Linux views in a discussion with CNET News.com.

Q: What was your reaction when you heard that Novell plans to buy SuSE?
A: It's ironic, because Novell had everything when we were there. They could have owned Linux, and they could have pushed (Windows) NT right off the map. But it just wasn't the right time.

I'm pretty excited. Novell has to have a platform, and NetWare isn't it. It's out of gas. It's a has-been. They've done some good application infrastructure, but they need Linux, and Linux needs them. They'll come in and provide some stability and strength there. With SCO causing problems and creating such an unstable environment there, frankly, this has been such a good thing.

Were you surprised when you heard about the acquisition plan?
Yes and no. When we introduced Linux seven or eight years ago, we knew Novell needed Linux. I've actually been wondering why it's taken them so long, but certain things needed to be there. I think that Chris Stone's management team is well entrenched.

You were the founder of Caldera. What's the company's early history?
Myself and Bryan Sparks and Rob Hicks in the legal department got together over lunch, and we created a biz plan. How does Novell -- or we as a separate company -- compete against Microsoft? We felt that Linux could be the ideal platform.

The management team was against it (except then-Novell CEO chairman Ray Noorda). We set up a skunk works to develop Linux and higher-level network software. They were really quite threatened by what we had prototyped -- all that was running on top of a Linux environment. Then, Bob Frankenberg came in (replacing Noorda in 1994), and all the vice presidents were against what we were doing. Bob decided that we were going to focus on just the browser. It was threatening to the LAN WorkPlace team. They had gone in and convinced management that we just needed the browser. In reality, they just wanted to get our project and kill it.