Future of NetWare

I've talked about this one a lot, but more data keeps coming out. Novell held their Advanced Technical Training two weeks ago, and folk got a better look at the future of NetWare. David Kearns got wind of some trends and wrote about it.
That's not as troubling as the report I got from longtime reader Lewis Rosenthal about his trip to Provo for a training session, which included a discussion of the Open Enterprise Server (OES) roadmap. Rosenthal wrote: "I just thought I'd share with you a little bit I picked up while attending the OES Roadmap today, at ATT Live, here in Provo." Sounds good. But he gets right into the troubling news: "I can say without much doubt that NetWare - as we know it - will be vanishing in the next few years. Sometime after Cypress ships (the next version of Open Enterprise Server), Novell will be rolling out NetWare 'viX'. This will be a specially optimized version of NetWare to run in a virtual session on the Linux kernel, allowing 'legacy' NetWare NLMs to run in such an environment until such time as these applications can be migrated to OES Linux natively."
While I had rumors that the next version of NetWare would run inside a VM, this is the first solid word I've heard. It also tells me that the next version of OES, presumably 2.0, will not include a new NetWare kernel like I had predicted. Darn those rose-colored glasses anyway. Confirmation of this will most assuredly be given at BrainShare this year.

In other news, iFolder 3.0 will never be ported to NetWare. This is a product that began life on NetWare and has now left it. Signs of the times.

Time to start really boning up on bash scripts and the Linux driver model.