As a 20-year provider of proprietary software for the enterprise market, Novell has built products and a culture around proprietary (or closed) software. Within the last 18 months, we have embraced open source development and Linux and have injected them into our corporate DNA. While different, the two approaches are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I would argue embracing open source as a proprietary company is more straightforward than an open source company trying to move "up the stack." In this talk I will examine the myths, challenges, and opportunities for companies attempting to understand the best of both worlds.

Alan F. Nugent serves as chief technology officer of Novell. Prior to Novell, Alan was the Managing Partner, Technology, at Palladian Partners. Mr. Nugent has successfully led many different technology organizations. He serves on the Board of Directors and on the Technical Committee for the Object Management Group and is a widely respected writer and speaker on OT, BPR, and Information Management. He sits on the board of directors of several technology startup companies.

In the evolution of computers and networks, we have developed complex mechanisms to manage one, the other, or both. We organize teams based on technology or task, only to find that the tools they use converge at times and then diverge again. I'll discuss the latest convergences in the context of distributed systems management, network management, security, and voice in a world of ISPs, ASPs, Web services. It all boils down to this: why can't we manage the network just like one large UNIX box?

All security decisions involve trade-offs: how much security you get, and what you give up to get it. When we decide whether to walk down a dimly lit street, purchase a home burglar alarm system, or implement an airline passenger profiling system, we're making a security trade-off. Everyone makes these trade-offs all the time. It's intuitive and natural, and fundamental to being alive. But paradoxically, people are astonishingly bad at making rational decisions about these trade-offs.

Security expert Bruce Schneier discusses this notion of security trade-offs and how we are all "security consumers." He makes use of a five-step process to explicate these intuitive trade-offs and shows how the process can be applied to decisions both small and large. Learn how security works in the real world, and what you can do to get the security you want . . . not the security that is forced upon you.

With all those machines, the opportunities for parallelism and distributed computation are offset by the likelihood of hardware failure. If one machine breaks on average every few years, a pool of a thousand machines will have machines break on a daily basis. A key part of the Google story is that by designing a system to cope with breakage, we can provide not only robustness, but also parallelizability, efficiency, and economies of scale.

No one needs to be told that email spam is a serious problem, but some people don't truly understand how serious it is. The speaker now gets about 900 spams every day, a great many of them in character sets he can't even render, and is seeing a doubling rate of about four months. Many solutions have been proposed, falling primarily into two areas, legislative and technological.

The current state of spam will be reviewed, including some thoughts about the current legislative climate (and whether legislation has any chance of doing any good) and quite a bit about the various technologies that are being discussed and deployed. Although opinions will be offered, no conclusions will (or can) be drawn in an environment changing as quickly as we are seeing with email today.