Brainshare: Rest of day two

31 May 2004

Well, rest of the morning, at least. I bunked the afternoon to look around the stalls, and to have an argument about whether one always has the right to run Open Source software that's been distributed to you. I attended talks about Migration from Windows to Linux on the desktop, and on Novell's Open Enterprise Server (basically Netware 7) which will give you the choice of running on a Netware or Linux kernel.

The migration talk was little new to me - basically moving to Open Source on the Windows desktop, and then moving with those same applications to the Linux desktop. Somewhat intimated in the discussion is that Novell is/has been involved in a large desktop migration in SA that'll be finished by the end of the year.

The talk on Open Enterprise Server was the opposite - I didn't know anything about the components that made it up. Lots of acronyms and product names that didn't make a lot of sense.

The presenter suggested OES would provide the best of both worlds. From Linux: the benefits of popularity and market share, including application and vendor support. From Netware: the enterprise knowledge and applications. Over the conference, it's clear that Novell considers the Operating System market to be commodotised (by Linux), and the value that should be provided above that.

iPrint was something interesting I hadn't heard about before (perhaps because Novell likes renaming products), but it's a means to auto-configure printers on client machines (including drivers and configuration) by using a graphical location-finding interface. Can start with a map of the world and go down to the plans of a floor in a building.

iManager is their new fully browser-based enterprise management system, which can now manage both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and Netware running Novell's products. And, obviously, it works in Linux-based browsers without ActiveX and other silliness. (If Novell can do it, why can't everyone?)

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Hi, I'm Neil Blakey-Milner, a technology generalist most interested by open source, security, and building scalable systems (especially if I get to use the Python programming language).

I "work" at the incredibly fun web-sites-for-everyone startup SynthaSite based in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa.

What I do

  • StarCamp

    I was the main instigator behind this 2-day unconference in December 2007 in Cape Town. There'll be another one in Cape Town around July.

  • GeekDinner

    I help out in making these geek social events happen every two months in Cape Town since March 2007.

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    I make sure that the systems run smoothly at this Cape Town-born Web 2.0 startup.

  • Presentations

    I speak publically on a number of topics - generally related to technical aspects of open source software or on software development.

  • Code

    I've written a few software projects of my own over the years (although mostly I'm the only user of them).

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