Ron Hovsepian, Novell's president, speaking at a press event in Sydney, conceded that "about 2,000 employees right now out of 5,000 are single-boot only, which is Linux only, the rest are dual-boot." He said that a project to migrate the 3,000 dual-boot workers to open source is likely to be completed over the next year or so.
The shift from Windows and Office to the open source software was first mooted in March 2004, with chief information officer Debra Anderson handed the task.
At the time, Anderson said she hoped most of Novell's staff would have moved to Linux and the OpenOffice.org office suite by mid-2005.
Hovsepian's remarks indicate Novell will have at most a few months' experience as a complete Linux and open source desktop shop behind it when, according to the vendor's predictions, the software starts taking off in the mainstream. He told ZDNet Australia sister site CNET News.com on Friday in the United States that Linux on the desktop would start taking off over the next 12 to 18 months, with the scheduled mid-2006 release of SuSE Linux Desktop 10 being one of the factors fuelling growth.
However, while Hovsepian today stressed Novell was "in the process of finishing the migration right now," and Anderson acknowledged back in 2004 the numbers would never be clear cut because of dual-booting scenarios, the lengthy time frame required raises questions about the practical challenges for enterprises examining desktop Linux and open source software rollouts.
Such rollouts have been extremely scarce in Australia, with few organisations prepared to go public with a desktop Linux implementation.
In response to a question from ZDNet Australia on whether Novell had in fact been contracted for any sort of enterprise desktop Linux deployment down under, Hovsepian played it cool.
"None that we can chat about at this point," he said.
The Novell executive said in Sydney the vendor's desktop Linux implementation had been missing some of the pieces enterprises needed, but said version 10 of the software would help the market for desktop Linux pick up.
Regarding his company's own Linux migration, Hovsepian said Novell had learnt a lot from the implementation, and overcome challenges involving, for example, porting macros from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org.
"We've had actually very good success with it," he said. "We learned a lot about migration tools, learned a lot about what the usability pieces are."
Soooo.... their timeline is stretched for their own internal migration. Having 3,000 desktops out of 5,000 dual-booting Windows and Linux and the remaining 2,000 single-booting Linux still means all 5,000 can boot Linux. And all 5,000 can run OpenOffice.org.
The article implies that Novell's experience with desktop Linux deployment is too limited to qualify it to help others do the same. Who is better qualified in your estimation--ZDNet, Dell, Microsoft? You seem to be discounting their experience to insinuate that either they are not ready to help others migrate, or that Linux is not ready for the desktop. Being a desktop Linux user of five years, a bus driver of 17 years, and having never taken any computer courses in my life, I challenge you to take the position that Linux is not ready for the average desktop computer user. And if I were to choose a vendor to help my organization deploy Linux on the desktop, I would want one with exactly Novell's experience under its belt to help steer my organization clear of any hurdles it discovered on the way.
The fact that they are making the transition at all speaks louder about their commitment to Linux than the delays in their timeline do to their competance at desktop Linux deployment, regardless of your article's slant.
It's amazing that with such a successful example of desktop Linux deployment in progress being handed to you on a silver platter that you look for and "find" a story of failure and disappointment. How many other Linux vendors do you know of who have deployed Linux throughout their own organizations on the desktop, let alone any who have done so in such a public manner.
I commend them. Having their own internal organization running the same software they sell to others gives them immense opportunities for quality feedback that they can poor back into development. And it gives them a level of credibility most other vendors cannot match.