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Jan. 9, 2010

Nat Friedman, co-founder of Ximian and Chief Technology and Strategy Officer for Open Source at Novell has announced that he has already quit the Linux vendor.

Friedman, who co-founded Ximian with Miguel de Icaza in 1999, joined Novell in 2003 when the company acquired Ximian. Since then he has headed up Novell's open source strategy, and has done a very fine job at that.

Well respected in the Linux and open source community, in his announcement, Nat says that since he has recently married, and now that his latest project, SUSE Studio is out of the door, he felt it was "a natural breaking point and time for something new".

Friedman plans to spend this year travelling the world with his new wife and looking for volunteering opportunities. One project that Friedman has already started work on is Hacker Medley, a podcast "for curious hackers".

Last month, there was quite a bit of reorganization that went on at Novell with the Open Platform Solutions division being merged into a new "Security, Management and Operating Platforms" unit, headed up by Jim Ebzery who was senior vice president for the company's Identity and Security Management unit.

Friedman held the post of original founder and CEO of Ximian from 1999 to 2001 when Ximian brought in David Patrick as an external CEO after the company raised $15,000,000 of venture capital.

Over the years Friedman has worked for Novell, he says "One thing that has caused endless debate on the part of both users and pundits is exactly what Novell is up to purchasing the two companies that are the best known backers of the rival GNOME and KDE desktops, Ximian and SUSE, respectively."

He continues with "Many have wondered if perhaps Novell had second thoughts about GNOME after buying Ximian and thus moved on to SuSE to remedy the situation. I don't see the conflicting desktop alliances as an issue. Enterprises don’t care about GNOME and KDE. They care about having a desktop environment that’s stable, low-cost to administer, secure, interoperable with their existing network services, and flexible.”

"This doesn't mean that Novell will simply back away from both projects. Novell will continue to support both GNOME and the KDE desktop shells. But Novell's big push will be to attempt to get the various Free Software projects to work together for a more unified set of desktop technologies," added Friedman.

Nat continues with "With the strengths Novell has gained from each acquisition in the past 10 years, SUSE brings Novell the world's most advanced, stable Linux platform available."

Before starting Ximian, Friedman worked on the GNU ROPE project, and interned at SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc.) and Microsoft.

In 1999, Nat received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics from MIT.

The nephew of actor Brad Dourif, Friedman currently lives with his wife in Munich, Germany.

In November 2009, Novell announced that it is reorganizing the company into two business units from the current four. The reorganization sees Novell's Identity and Security Management (ISM) unit, the Systems and Resource Management (SRM) unit and the Linux focussed Open Platform Solutions (OPS) unit merged into a single Security, Management and Operating Platforms unit.

The new unit is to be headed up by ISM's current senior vice president, Jim Ebzery. The other business unit will be the Collaboration Solutions unit, headed up by Colleen O'Keefe.

The new business unit heads will report directly to CEO Ron Hovsepian who described the reorg as "designed to transform Novell into a more focused, integrated and agile global company".

Novell is aligning itself as a vendor for what are called Intelligent Workload Management solutions; integrating systems and identity management to create a policy driven environment for handling physical, virtualised or cloud systems.

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Source: Nat Friedman.

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