Interview: Novell’s Greg Mancusi-Ungaro

Have you ever wanted to get into the minds of the people behind Novell’s SuSE distro? Well here is your chance….

LXF: On the Novell company blogs recently, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether a Linux company can be ‘the next Microsoft’…

Greg Mancusi-Ungaro: Well, Red Hat in one of their initial prospectuses said ‘our goal is to be the Microsoft of Linux’. Actually, that made a lot of people wince! I don’t think that should be the goal. I think what you want to be is, in effect, like Switzerland - you want to be the people of unquestionable integrity. You want to be the people with the technical precision, the people who are neutral, but who are leaders.

You don’t want to stand on the sidelines; you want to take positions and take on issues, but you want to try and do it as an ambassador to the community. That’s how Novell views its role. I don’t know if you want to be the Microsoft of anything.

LXF: Do you think that any company can be the Linux equivalent of Microsoft, given that it’s an open source OS and people can do pretty much what they want?

GMU: Well, if we ever woke up one day and said ‘Wow, Novell is the Microsoft of Linux’ or ‘Red Hat is the Microsoft of Linux’, then the Linux movement would be over. What you want to say is, Novell is the enabler - the company that’s enabling Linux to be successful. But Linux is largely held in trust by the community, and Novell is making Linux work for large enterprises. That’s a very different thing. Microsoft controls everything; it can make nations change their mind, and not in a good way I don’t think.

All Novell can do, and all Novell really wants to do, is state the facts of the situation, and advocate. So in that way, we understand that we influence Linux, but we don’t own Linux. Microsoft owns everything: it owns the ground, it owns the tracks, it owns the trains. We don’t, we know that, and it means we have to play a more collaborative role - and we relish that…. Source: Linux Format

[tags]novell,linux,community,red hat[/tags]