Novell woos open source community

Novell plans to tighten its products' ties with open-source software by bundling open-source software with its own commercial products, including its flagship NetWare OS. This will help the company create incentives to get open-source developers to use Novell software. Novell also will commit to incorporate Web services standards within its products, including the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) standard for locating Web services on a network.

NetWare 6.5 will ship this year and will be packaged with the open source database MySQL and Apache Web server. The upcoming version of NetWare will also incorporate a J2EE version 1.3 Java application server. The company feels that the packaging will make it easier to build business applications using NetWare and to share information with non-NetWare software. To show its commitment to ongoing standards efforts, Novell said that it will release the code for its Nsure identity management software to the standards group that handles the UDDI standard. Novell's Nsure server is used to verify the identity of people as they log onto a network to access applications.