Novell: Fighting the Microsoft FUD machine

Do you think the more zealous elements of the Linux community, who regard the Linux or Windows debate as some idealistic struggle, have scared away some potential corporate customers?
Patrick: No, the biggest IT company in the world is IBM and it hasn't scared them off. There is no sign of IBM's position on Linux weakening at all. Things like SCO came in and created a little bubble but apart from that…

SCO seems to have gone quiet recently. What's your feeling on how that whole situation is going to play out?
Patrick: At this point SCO has not produced any credible evidence that there is anything infringing inside of Linux. It has gone quiet because they have failed to produce anything that would make anyone nervous. Novell is indemnifying their customer base, which is a big jump. We have finally got to the point where we are going to put up or shut up and we put up.

What is your take on Microsoft's involvement with SCO -- do you think they were really pulling the strings in the background, as some people have suggested given the links to SCO funding company BayStar?
Patrick: Sure. Why not? Why wouldn't they? It is a threat.

It's almost a year since you were acquired by Novell. Has there been any issues integrating the two company cultures?
Murray: You take a small start-up with heavy Web-services architecture, used to collaborating on the Net, and you have a relatively staid enterprise software development methodology on the other side. The first thing you think is that they are going to mix together like oil and water. In the reality it has been just the opposite. It's like all this young blood has gone into revitalising certain engineering groups.

Did you have any misgivings about being acquired by Novell -- a company that had a very dominant position once but lost its way through a combination of mismanagement and locking horns with Microsoft?
Patrick: It was our choice to do it. We had independent secure financing from VCs so we weren't at any risk of not getting venture funding and we has also talked to a number of companies about potentially partnering. We had a number of very bright open-source engineers with visions of getting Linux deployed but at a certain point we realised that as a start-up we weren't going to be able to get this deployed enterprise wide and globally.

Patrick: We needed to combine ourselves with a world-class enterprise software company but how many of the surviving enterprise class companies could help us? The list wasn't very long. Novell was in a unique position, extremely well financed, $700m in the bank, Jack Messman had done an extremely good job of stabilising the organisation. This was a company that can potentially turn the corner now but it needed a catalyst and that was Linux. We all agreed we needed a distribution so even before Ximian was acquired it was on the table that we would have to go to the next step and buy SuSE.

That was a condition of your being acquired by Novell?
Patrick: Well, it wasn't a condition, not like a purchasing sales agreement, but it was on the table that we had to do that and it was all agreed conceptually.

Murray: Don't think of that so much as condition of sales as much as it was two companies coming together to create a joint strategy. We said these are the things that we can do together but, hey, there is still a piece missing which is the distribution.