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Love: Novell could have had it all

Stephen Shankland CNET News.com

Published: 24 Nov 2003 12:00 GMT

So you left.
I left. Bryan and I had to re-engineer all the stuff we'd done inside of Novell. We partnered with Red Hat because we wanted to provide a commercial desktop. Novell had everything. They would have had just about everything they needed on top of Linux. That would have been a major deterrent for NT success.

Back then, why would anyone think Linux had a better chance than NetWare?
We were using Linux as a desktop at the same time. It was more stable than Windows NT at the time. And NT as a server was a joke.

But NetWare was so dominant they were almost killed by their own success. NetWare was so successful that they could never move on.

Why did you leave Caldera?
We'd just gone through the acquisition of a major company (the Santa Cruz Operation's Unix business) that was extremely poorly managed. They'd ramped up because they had such success with Y2K, so we had to go right down to the core to salvage the company. At the same time, the economy was going south, and most of our revenue was very much economically tied to companies like KFC and McDonald's. If there's an economic upswing, we prosper, and if it goes down, people don't eat out as much.

We stopped the haemorrhaging, and were able to get the thing profitable. But with all the issues we had to deal with on the board, plus the SCO guys -- we had two SCO members on the board -- it was tough. There was a lot of tension. We were doing so many changes -- plus we were having to keep the people incented, because the stock options were so far under water.

We got through the really hard stuff, but at the end of the battle, you're still covered in blood. To move the company forward, it made a lot of sense. It was a mutual agreement: Let's get somebody new in. Darl (McBride) I knew from my work at Novell.

We knew we had salvaged a wonderful channel. We had great technology on the Unix side, wonderful customers and the UnitedLinux thing done. We'd set the stage to do the next step.

It's so ironic, the turn of events. (Caldera began discussing) what we can do through UnitedLinux to indemnify people who had used both Unix and Linux. Apparently, Darl took that in a little different direction than we intended.