I hate that people still bash the hell out of Netware without ever looking at it.

People don't generally bash the ideas in NetWare. For instance, their directory became the standard on which LDAP and eventually M$'s Active Directory were born from. Unfortunately Novell couldn't market bottled water in the middle of the desert, so their products, while being great technically, lost market share as real desktop operating systems took on many of the features of Novell's "Network Operating System."

I think people who bash it are people who've had to use archaic versions of NetWare which are still running all over the place because, well, surprise! They work. But they sure ain't pretty!