Well, I’m very excited about Brainshare which starts tomorrow. Not only because I work for Novell but because I am just as supprised about the announcements as anyone else is. Novell is very good about keeping announments away from employees who don’t need to know as well as the public. I assume there will be some impressive OpenSource announcements made as well as product and partner related news. From what I hear, the news presses will be sent out Monday and Tuesday mornings. I’ll try to blog what I get from the show floor. I’ll also be taking pictures and posting there both here and in my gallery.

This year I accepted an offer to fill a position on the Novell Users International (NUI) Board of Directors. NUI is a large non-profit organization funded mainly by Novell which is comprised of Novell users, consultants and partners around the world. There are members on every continent and in most countries. The board consists of people with diverse backgrounds from both Novell as well as OpenSource/Linux. NUI holds a leadership training conference in conjuntion with Brainshare every year, usually the weekend before the Novell conference begins. We just finished up NUI’s conference which was a great success IMO. There were several breifings by Novell executives on products and company direction.

NUI is doing something new this year. They realise that the future direction of Novell is heavily based on Linux and dealing properly with the OpenSource community. Thats why they asked be to be a part of the board and thats also why I accepted the invitation. I am very protective of OpenSource, I’m an advocate and belive in it’s priciples. I really hope to be able to bring my experiences to the table with NUI and help them to understand OpenSource, the community around it and how to really be a part of the community. They have a few hundered thousand usergroup members world-wide who are itching to get to know Linux and OpenSource. They want to integrate into the community and they also want to start initiatived within their own organizations and user groups that will facilitate learing and training in the new technologies that Novell has.

Very cool. I think both NUI and OpenSource communities have a lot of knowledge and experience to share with each other. I think however, the line between the two groups should not be considered very pronounced at all. In fact, in the same way that Linux has always been in the “enterprise” (IT staff has always has it running and doing something in the organization dispite the lack of knowledge or approval of management), Linux has always been a part of NUI simply because many of it’s members have been using Linux for years. The change that is coming is that Linux will now be a topic of discussion, training and conferences in the NUI world.

On the other side, OpenSource had typically never cared about NetWare and untill the last two years, they have never cared about Novell. Now, don’t get me wrong, Novell has done some great things that have really solidified their position as an advocate of OpenSource and set company direction and strategy toward developing OpenSource and contribting back to the community. One of the best things I have heard said from Novell was in Jack Messman’s key notes last year when he said that Novell will always “give back more to the open-source community than it takes” [1] [2].

Despite this, Linux and OpenSource community will never align themselves with a single Linux vendor. There is a gerneral distrust of commercialism with regard to the development of OpenSource Software (OSS) as commercialism has a primary goal of making money, not protecting and developing OSS) and therefore, Linux and OSS is a vehichle to wealth, not a goal in and of itself. It’s the diversity and different implementations that help Linux grow. It’s the fact that no one organization, business or person owns Linux that not only keeps it safe from control of a small number of selfish, greedy entities, but also gurantees it’s contunued freedom and growth. People are free to take it and change it as the see fit, giving back changes to the community.

The Linux community will never be a Novell, Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake or other specific vendor community and thoes vendors should not want that if they see a long-term vision of a symbiotic relation ship between them and OSS development communities. Because of this, NUI needs to reach out to the OpenSource community and become a part of it. That may include joining and participating in the local Linux User Groups (LUGs) and starting Special Interest Groups (SIGs) within the NUI groups and contribut to OpenSource, combined activities, installfests, speakers, etc. Just like Jack Messman stated when talking about Novell, NUI needs to give back to the community more than it takes and understand that the golden rule applies everywhere: What ‘s good for Linux is good for NUI.

Linux is the largest OpenSource success story and it has changed the course of computing in the world. A very important thought occured to me about two or three years ago and I wrote it down. I have mentioned it in several conversations with friends and in user groups. We are seeing something the world has never seen before:

It’s been amazing to see the growth and acceptance of Linux over the years. It’s been a wild ride and I look forward to more of the same!