| Good-bye Mr. Noorda |
Oct. 09, 2006
Ray Noorda, a giant of the computer industry, died October 9 of Alzheimer's-related illness. It was my pleasure to know Mr. Noorda during his best days, when, as CEO of Novell Inc., he took an obscure network operating system, NetWare, and turned it into the first major PC network OS.
He wasn't a developer. He was just a tough businessman with the nerve to take on Microsoft, which he saw as a threat to dominate the desktop long before everyone else did.
Linux and open-source owes Noorda another, more direct, debt.
When Novell bought Unix and USL (Unix Systems Laboratories) from AT&T, rather than continue to fight with BSDI (Berkeley Software Design Inc.) over possible Unix intellectual property rights violations in BSD/OS (an early, commercial BSD Unix), Noorda famously declared that he'd rather compete in the marketplace than in court, and the two sides came to an amiable agreement.
Without the threat of a lawsuit hanging over the BSD Unixes, and later Linux, open-source developers were free to create the operating systems we use today.
Indeed, not long before he retired because of the onslaught of Alzheimers, Noorda believed that Linux was the future for Novell and supported Bryan Sparks and Ransom Love in an internal Linux skunkworks project.
Novell, by then under Bob Frankenberg, killed off the Linux project. Soon thereafter, Noorda cut his ties with Novell. Noorda wasn't done with Linux even if the Novell of the mid-90s was. He used his investment company, The Canopy Group, to bankroll Caldera Systems, one of the first Linux companies
It was only years later that Novell realized the error of its ways and bought SUSE to return to Linux. Had Noorda had his way, Novell, and not Red Hat, would today be the number one Linux company.
One of the tragedies of his later years was that, after Alzheimers left him unable to direct Canopy, his Canopy successors presided over the attacks by Caldera, soon to be re-named SCO, on Linux.
In a way it was a blessing that his ailment had left him removed from the pain of the world. Canopy became a battleground for control between family and old friends over much of Noorda's fortune.
But, I prefer not to think of the dark days of his businesses after he had left them. No, I'd rather recall the straightforward, hard-working businessman I knew who saw the future in PC networks and open-source operating systems.
Good-bye Mr. Noorda, I'll miss you.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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