“Conversely, customers get very little value from Spacewalk unless they already have a subscription to RH.”

Guess the didn’t think about:
– increased security from not having to open up firewall holes to the Internet
– decreased bandwidth since all of your servers aren’t pulling updates across the ISP link
– all the people using Fedora, CentOS, and most other RPM based distros that RedHat doesn’t support

I think Ubuntu’s Landscape service is great, but I would like to have the option to run that service in-house, preferable in an open-source manner like the rest of the distro. I’m a firm believer that the availability of Landscape is going to draw the same number of paying customers whether its open source or proprietary, so why not provide a benefit to the MUCH MUCH larger community as a whole by open sourcing Landscape.

You are so correct: Novell directory service on Linux should have been a HUGE hit. I will check in with NOVL to see where eDirectory for SUSE and other OSes (Ubuntu?) is heading.

Purely FYI: Our sister site, http://www.TheVARguy.com, covers all the commercial Linux flavors and partner strategies.

But after Allchin went to MS NOOOO one was getting their hands on Banyan.

I even wish that Novell would make eDirectory more easy to install on other versions of Linux (Other then Suse) and that iFolder etc worked with that. eDirectory is pretty slick and has always been more robust then AD.

But again thanks Joe for the follow up. I will be looking forward to more stories about the subject here on the site.

An easy to set up user management and filesharing solution like Windows AD and CIFS (Printserving) is what really took MS over the top.

Remember (If you are as old as I am. LOL) when Banyan vines and Novell NDS were top dogs. They ran the networking world because they provided filesharing user management, print sharing and email based on the centralized user databases provided in their LDAP implementations.

Now all those things that made Banyan and Novell great are now provided by AD. Yet there is no similar over all solution for Linux.

And I am not talking about trying to copy Windows SBS. I am talking about trying to provide the same services out the box that Windows 2003 standard and enterprise offer.

1. if u run RHEL u use RHN… and u don’t care about SpiceWalk

2. if u run CentOS and Fedora witch SpiceWalk u can enjoy central package management and more…

Redhat is cooking (with FreeIPA) a truly free it infrastructure management package… Ubuntu is not… it’s just a fact not accusation cos I really like Ubu/Kubu and hope that in the future will try to provide open tools for it management… competition is always welcomed