Open, closed: Novell's 'mixed source' software

SUBANG JAYA: There’s open source software )OSS), there’s what Novell Inc chief technology officer Alan Nugent calls “closed source” -- meaning proprietary -- software, and then there’s Novell’s own “mixed-source” software.

Nugent was describing Novell’s own policy, one that he said brought together the best of open source and Novell’s proprietary software, and was periodically realigned so that the two complemented each other as best as possible.

“We make our proprietary technology available on open source platforms, and we participate in the OSS movement,” said Nugent, who was in Malaysia for Novell’s Linux Day event here on Monday.

He said that Novell reassessed its strategy every quarter to decide the proper mix of proprietary and open source software, so that Novell’s efforts remained complementary to what the OSS movement was concentrating on.

In the proprietary space, Novell would focus on things that it considered important but were not currently being addressed by the OSS movement. Currently, Novell was concentrating on its identity management and asset management products.

As an example, Nugent cited the ZENworks resource management product, which managed the entire lifecycles of servers, desktop PCs, personal digital assistants and other devices on the corporate network, using policy-driven automation and Novell’s identity services capabilities.

But Nugent noted that the OSS movement would often change its areas of focus, which made it necessary for his company to review its own areas of focus on a regular basis.

This process of change was not always predictable, he pointed out.

As an example, he said, a year ago it seemed appropriate for Novell to have a proprietary Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application server, given the market dominance of IBM and BEA in the enterprise software sector.

“But then the OSS movement came out with its own application server, so we decided to drop our J2EE application server and bundle its open-source counterpart with our products instead,” he recalled.

It's about customers

The criterion for deciding what should be left to the OSS movement, and what Novell should work on, was based on an assessment of how to meet customers’ needs, Nugent said.

The market demanded open source solutions, he acknowledged. “But if we were totally open-source, we couldn’t meet the needs of our enterprise and government customers.

“So we can’t be totally open source or totally proprietary. Deciding on the right balance between them is an ongoing exercise where we try to do the right thing by our shareholders, the community and the market,” he said.

Over the next year or so, Novell’s technology focus would be on its traditional platform products, as well as identity services, the latter being incorporated into a full suite of identity management solutions, resource management solutions and web-based applications development tools, Nugent said.

The reason for focusing on identity services was the need to put individual consumers of information -– taxpayers in the case of government services, customers, staff at the office and in the field -- at the centre of an application, rather than the traditional approach of putting the process at the centre.

A related concept was “federated identities” – assigning identities to information systems, to facilitate and help secure the system-to-system interactions that were an unseen but important part of so many user transactions.

"Very often, a user is at one end of a transaction, but the system he is interacting with needs to interact with other systems to get the information or service he needs.

“For instance, when I book a plane ticket online I don’t want to interact with or even know about Sabre (a major reservation system used by the airline industry). I just want my ticket,” he said.

This identity-based computing was organised around collecting information in realtime and presenting it to a user, somewhat like a software agent.

But unlike a software agent – an autonomous, lightweight and indiscriminate piece of software -- creating and managing identities for information systems was a much more significant undertaking for Novell.

Thumbs-up for Malaysia

Meanwhile, Nugent said he was impressed with the Malaysian Government’s open source computing policy, as laid out in a speech at the Linux Day event by Mampu consulting project director Dr Yusseri Mohamad Yusof.

“They’ve considered it thoroughly. I wish more national governments would learn from their example,” he remarked.

Nugent singled out for praise such provisions in Malaysia's Public Sector OSS Masterplan -- unveiled earlier this year -- as the one requiring that OSS be a part of every IT decision, and the one forbidding IT tender bids from favouring proprietary technology.

He also praised the policy for encompassing areas such as education, training, procurement and development, and setting targets against which actual achievements could be measured.

“The Malaysian Government is very vocal and specific about what it wants to do with open source computing,” he said.