When will Novell open source the Netware Operating System?
Why would they? People who are still using it represent a continuing revenue stream for Novell. Where’s the value in freeing it? They may not be at liberty to release the code; there may be technologies inside Netware that they do not own, but are rather licensing from others. This is a known barrier preventing OS/2 from being “open sourced,” and was troublesome, in the early days, when Netscape released Mozilla, as they had to “chop out” pretty large portions of the application that weren’t theirs to release. “Open source Mozilla” didn’t become useful until several years after the initial release. Even if there aren’t direct licensing issues, there will be indirect ones. For instance, plenty of Netware-based applications expect to use BTrieve (which belongs to Pervasive). There’s a further question of whether anyone would *really* care all that much. An “open source” Netware isn’t going to necessarily have Novell’s support (to the point of support contracts), and it seems to me that i
