Posted in Google, Novell at 5:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
There have been various speculations — however baseless they may be — about Robert Love’s sudden departure from Novell. Later on came the clarification from Robert himself. It turns out that he followed the same route as Jeremy Allison, essentially leaving Novell in order to join Google. You may recall that Chris DiBona issued an open invitation to Novell staff back in 2006. He opened their doors without saying much, except for the fact that Google were hiring.
Dana Blankenhorn has a good roundup of departures in Novell. He also asks, “Will the last top developer out of Novell please turn off the lights?”. Novell’s PR responds on his blog. They are throwing sand at the burning fire.
Further to the previous post (you are advised to read it first if you haven’t, just for context), here is some more information and analysis.
It does not appear as though Dell is considering Novell’s Linux desktop, so Ubuntu is probably unaffected. On the server side, things become a little more interesting, even somewhat tricky. Novell does, after all, have some ‘intellectual property’ commitments to Microsoft. Hopefully, Dell does not inherit any of these.
Pamels Jones of Groklaw asks, “So, does this mean Dell now becomes a distributor of GPL software now? Will Microsoft still distribute those SUSE vouchers, or, to avoid GPLv3, is it going to get Mikey [Dell] to do it?”.
Dell blesses Microsoft, Novell pact, still wears Red Hat
Microsoft and Novell, seeking to build industry support for their unusual alliance, have signed up Dell as the first computer maker to formally back the deal.
Dell says it will market Novell’s Suse Enterprise Linux Server to business customers based on terms of the pact struck between Microsoft and Novell last year. Dell says it was won over by their plans to make Windows and Linux work more smoothly together, and by their promises not to pursue claims against each other’s users for patent infringement.
The pact between Microsoft and Novell is primarily aimed at the growing number of major companies and government agencies that rely on both Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft’s patent-protected Windows and Novell’s open-source Linux platform to run their computers.
To encourage more companies to choose Novell’s open-source platform, Microsoft has promised not to file patent-rights lawsuits over any of its technology that’s blended with Suse Linux.
The concession is meant to address concerns of corporate users who have been reluctant to use Linux because they feared Microsoft might retaliate with patent-infringement claims.
Surely, being a major development, there will be a lot to discuss later. Since this breaking news may seem pretty urgent, let us call this a placeholder. Watch this space. There are more details in a Reuters article.
How will this affect Canonical and Ubuntu, if at all? We shall soon find out. For the time being, here is just a video of Mark Shuttleworth talking about his historic deal with Dell.
Novell believes it can hit a pricing sweet spot with Linux on the enterprise desktop and remains in talks with top OEMs — including Dell — about preloading SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on PC clients.
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