A day after networking-software maker Novell announced that it had bought Ximian, a firm that helps businesses adopt Linux on the desktop, Novell executives said it"s likely that their company"s own NetWare operating system will go fallow in favor of Linux.
Novell plans to run its NetWare services--such as eDirectory and Secure Identity Management--on the Red Hat and SuSE Linux distributions. Novell currently has products that run on Linux, Unix, Windows and NetWare. "NetWare will continue to exist with a large customer base, and we will continue to maintain it as long as customers want it," said Chris Stone, vice chairman at Novell. Stone said he thought NetWare support would continue for the foreseeable future, even if development does not. "There are still people using (the) VMS (operating system) and minicomputers. Just because development stops, doesn"t mean people stop using it."