Palamida, which tracks and informs readers about GPLv3 adoption, seems to have shifted to a more regular reporting cycle. Here is the latest:
This is a growth of 50 new projects , which is consistent with past growth of approximately 50 projects per week.
”Acceleration is an indication of a ‘network effect’, which is even more important than a ‘tipping point’.“As indicated there, one nice chart to see is a chart where the y-axis is the number of new projects whose licence is to be upgraded (the x-axis being week or month). This would show pace of growth, which seems to have accelerated at some stage in the past. Acceleration is an indication of a ‘network effect’, which is even more important than a ‘tipping point’.
One of the issues that GPLv3 addresses is software patents. It seems clear that the patent trolls are keeping busy. The Burst lawsuit is far from over.
“…The order leaves 22 claims remaining, claims that the court did not find as invalid or anticipated. These remaining 22 claims include some significant audio and video claims that reach key Apple products including the Mac. Burst looks forward to trying its case in court against Apple early next year.”
Remember the Burst video that we once mentioned? It was used to show what type of trivial things get patented nowadays. These patents are intended to be used to abuse large companies. They are used against development.
To Burst, What a victim would be better than a popular iPod? A couple of months ago, after millions of PlayStation 3s had been sold, a lesser-known company sued Sony for patent infringement and demanded the destruction of all PlayStation 3s. The trolls aim for high numbers. How about Greenpeace (whom I personally appreciate) using an attack on the iPhone — being a just scapegoat — to generate more media buzz that serves Greenpeace? It brings greater awareness to Greenpeace’s cause, but harassment it is too.
It is worth adding that In the video above, Mark Webbink repeats what was said in a few isolated places before. The Linux kernel will potentially be upgraded to GPLv3+ one day, assuming some scenarios. One such hypothetical scenario, which was mentioned in the kernel’s mailing lists, involves Sun choosing GPLv3 for OpenSolaris. Under such circumstances, Linus Torvalds is at least willing to think about GPLv3. He is not ready to say farewell to what he perceives as a better licence (GPLv2).
Paula Rooney has just published another short article to bring up all up to date.
With that, Microsoft plans to offer the first real beta of its “Viridian” virtualization hypervisor. The fully baked Viridian hypervisor — which is supposed to be compatible with Xen — is expected to ship six months after Windows server 2008. It’s unclear the extent to which this Xen compatibility will benefit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, which also is based on Xen. Seems obvious Novell’s Linux will benefit more.
This serves as further confirmation that Novell’s deal with Microsoft is an anti-Red Hat alliance (among many other things). Red Hat hopes to conquer a majority of the servers (>50%) by 2015, but Microsoft recruited Novell in order to give Red Hat a hard time. “Interoperability is needed,” you say? Nobody even knows for sure what real benefits are gained by ignoring open standards and, regardless, this whole thing that Microsoft and Novell call “interoperability” is not much more than a hoax and a marketing buzzword. It is used to give the impression that Red Hat will suffer from incompatibilities in the datacentre. Read this:
Let’s call MS’s “interoperability” campaign what it really is. Its a farce of half-hearted attempts to LOOK like they’re doing something (for their Press Releases, EU, and public), but not really achieving anything substantial if they don’t see or get any direct benefit from it. When it comes to standards, it must be standards made by them, that they control and lead. (Which means they control the tempo of when new features and changes are released…They’ll be your friend now, simply out of convenience to them).
It’s an exceptionally strong view and it validates the suspicions many people have had from the start.
Novell is extensively overhauling its channel organization, including making changes among its channel management ranks, in a bid to increase sales through resellers and cut the company’s sales costs. While details remain scarce, the changes include reducing the number of accounts Novell will service through its direct sales force and inc
Novell is creating some jobs in Dublin. This was reported before (not necessarily materialising though).
As reported by siliconrepublic.com last month, Novell started the year with 100 people in Sandyford and this has grown to 125 people. By the end of this year the company will be employing close to 200 people in Dublin.
Matt Asay offers a positive work for Novell, for a change.
Several years ago I was at Novell while the company struggled with a difficult dilemma: How to grow revenues with its then-primary cash cow (NetWare) was declining at an 11% annual clip, a rate that was accelerating. The company responded to this decline by acquiring SUSE as a way to hold down NetWare losses, porting NetWare services to SUSE Linux (Open Enterprise Server), and shift to the Linux growth engine to replace NetWare.
So it is that every time it appears that SCO’s cases are finally coming to an end the company seems to find a new way to continue its litigation. The bankruptcy court’s ruling on whether SCO can be sold will be SCO’s next critical test. If the deal with York is allowed, SCO’s Unix and Linux litigation seems certain to continue for at least another year. This SCO soap opera is far from over.
Maureen O’Gara is still highly delusional and she’s posting bogus articles about Novell selling UNIX to SCO before the trial and even dropping its case against SCO. It’s amazing what disinformation can reach the ‘tubes’ nowadays, especially when one is self-publishing (without peers, let alone an editor).
Look at the bright side though. At least O’Gara no longer posts incognito, so you know immediately which ‘articles’ are safe to skip and altogether ignore. She is still attacking the GPL and Groklaw, so little has changed, albeit she’s more restrained. Laura Didio has been off the radar for a very long time.
Novell’s GroupWise gets a lift from a third party.
Privacy Networks’ enterprise-level email archiving solution adds GroupWise to its current offerings for Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino
Here is what’s potentially an old press release (i.e. reposted), but maybe it’s just reminiscent of a previous one about ArcMail and GroupWise:
ArcMail Technology, a leading provider of email archiving technology, today announced the release of the new ArcMail Defender for GroupWise. The network appliance combines archiving and data compression technology with on-board storage for a comprehensive GroupWise email archiving solution. ArcMail Defender for GroupWise provides seamless compatibility with the GroupWise email protocol through an ArcMail software gateway that is installed on a company’s Windows server.
Novell today announced it has been positioned in the leaders quadrant of Gartner, Inc.’s, “Magic Quadrant for Web Access Management, 2H07″ by Ray Wagner and Earl Perkins, Oct. 29, 2007. Novell Access Manager(TM), the company’s Web access management solution, protects both Web and enterprise applications and helps organizations enhance user productivity, streamline administration, increase security and ensure compliance.
The following seems like old news (from LinuxWorld, circa August when Dell made the big announcement). It’s back in the press and Novell makes some noise about it (with a photo even).
The slow, toe-in-the-water approach by PC makers to the Linux desktop continued on Wednesday, with Dell and Novell formalizing a deal to ship Dell OptiPlex 330 and 755 desktops preloaded with Novell’s SLED 10, to commercial accounts in China.
Presently, Novell generates most of its revenue from the server market as Microsoft’s Windows system still holds the lion’s share of the desktop segment.
[...]
The nation’s Linux market is projected to grow fivefold from 2006 to 2010 to $51.1 million, according to a report by IT researcher IDC.
Novell’s NetWare finds a place in the NHS, but I suspect we’ve seen this before. Anyway, here is the article.
Giant steps are what you take, to mis-quote Sting, when you’re Moonwalking. The Luton and Dunstable Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (the L&D), in Luton, UK, has deployed Moonwalk software as an information management scheme for its Novell Netware environment.
Novell Inc. donated $15,035 of software to the New Hampshire Audubon. The technology will help New Hampshire Audubon communicate efficiently will all its centers throughout the state and improve operations through shared calendars, documents and workgroups.
The team building Anne’s Diary has leveraged some technology from Novell including SUSE Linux Enterprise, eDirectory, Access Manager and Novell Modular Authentication Services, along with fingerprint technology from 123ID and a biometric reader from Fujitsu.
White is talking about art centers, symphonies, museums and high-end restaurants that draw corporate headquarters, the kind of headquarters that tend to leave Utah County rather than stay. Such companies include Ancestry.com, Authorize.net and Novell, which at one time were based in Utah County but have since been moving jobs out of the area.
The Linux Foundation is holding the next LSB Face-to-Face Meeting on November 7-9, 2007. Thanks to the generosity of Novell, the meeting will be held at Novell’s facilities in Provo, Utah.
A year has gone by since Novell betrayed Free software. It has also been about 6 months since Bruce Perens last rained on Novell’s parade, but let’s bring back some memorable key events.
Obviously, the Free Software community feels very strongly about this issue. But Free Software is not the only party represented. Many of the signers identify themselves as recent Novell VARs and institutional customers who will now turn to another Linux distribution.
Bruce actually foresaw dangers such as the Novell deal back in 1999. Read the following:
Efforts to hurt us from inside are the most dangerous. I think we’ll also see more attempts to dilute the definition of Open Source to include partially-free products, as we saw with the /Qt/ library in KDE before Troll Tech saw the light and released an Open Source license. Microsoft and others could hurt us by releasing a lot of software that’s just free enough to attract users without having the full freedoms of Open Source. It’s conceivable that they could kill off development of some categories of Open Source software by releasing a “good enough,” “almost-free-enough” solution. However, the strong reaction against the KDE project before the /Qt/ library went fully Open Source bodes poorly for similar efforts by MS and its ilk.
Once upon a time there was a software company called Novell. Novell had a friend “Big Mike” who was always getting in trouble with the law, but he was strong and had a big business.
[...]
The volunteers didn’t like any of this. They made sure that Novell couldn’t use any of their new work, but they shared it with all of Novell’s competitors. The volunteers stuck Novell with the full cost of maintaining all of their old work without their help, for as long as Novell had to support its own customers. The volunteers were also business owners, developers, VARs, and IT managers, and they never recommended Novell for anything again.
Salt Lake City — In a small conference room across the street from the location of Novell’s BrainShare conference, free-software advocate Bruce Perens attacked Novell’s patent deal with Microsoft and said that Novell was enabling Microsoft to run “a protection racket” with the threat of its patents.
[...]
More than that, though, Perens said, if the Novell-Microsoft patent deal is allowed to stand. It would take only as few as “two or three intellectual property law-suits” of open-source developers or small business at a cost of at least $5 million dollars a pop, to destroy open-source development. So, from where he sits, Novell is running a “protection racket” with “Big Mikey” as the enforcer
Several days after Novell’s Brainshare conference, Scott talked to Bruce Perens about the reaction to his news conference criticizing Novell’s financial and development agreements with Microsoft. In this conversation, Scott challenges an earlier Perens statement that the agreement amounts to “SCO all over again.”
When the anti-GPLv3 brigade went loose, Bruce decided to strike back as well.
“Let’s make it clear that [ACT] is Microsoft’s lobbying front and that they are going to paint as negative a picture as they can,” Perens told eWEEK in an interview.
“Obviously, GPL software is displacing Microsoft enough to have them concerned, and it’s doing it at customers who are important to them. A lawyer’s job is to scare the other side if they can–because they know it’s cheaper than winning a case in court,” he said.
”We, for one, thank Bruce for spending so much time letting himself be heard by the media on this topic.“Perens is one among several vocal luminaries and journalists that protest against the patent deals. Other examples include ITWire, Groklaw, Matt Asay (OSI), and Dave Rosenberg (Open Sources). There is a lot more opposition, but not all of it is quite so loud and active. In terms of its protest visibility, we are probably standing at the top at the moment.
We, for one, thank Bruce for spending so much time letting himself be heard by the media on this topic. This site is by no means alone, it’s not a niche, and it’s not a faction or “clique o’ zealots”. This site brings a picture of reality — one that some are too afraid to cope with, believe in, accept, and/or acknowledge.
Everyone whom I know that truly likes this deal is associated with Novell or Microsoft. Yesterday, it turned out that another journalist felt the same way. Read the following:
I realize it’s only one year in, but I think it would behoove Microsoft and Novell to flesh out what it is they mean when they talk about “interoperability frameworks” and the like. Revenue numbers from Novell for its OS business wouldn’t hurt, either.
The live version of openSUSE 10.3 is now available as a GNOME or KDE CD. Both contain the same software as the 1 CD installation versions would provide you with, but as a live version.
A live CD of a late test build was actually made available as well. That was about a month ago, but the one above is the latest and final.
The openSUSE board has been setup to lead the overall project. The board will: act as a central point of contact, help resolve conflicts, communicate community interests to Novell, facilitate communication with all areas of the community, and facilitate decision making processes where needed.
Francis is there as well, so “well done” in case he read this.
The Guiding Principles, which some liked and some just ridiculed when it was initially proposed in the mailing lists, is finally taking effect.
It’s official: the openSUSE project Guiding Principles are now in force. The Guiding Principles are a framework for the project and give everyone a clear view of who we are, what we stand for, what the project wants and how it works.
Novell has announced an agreement with Microsoft to settle potential antitrust litigation related to Novell’s NetWare operating system in exchange for $536 million in cash.
No prosecution, Novell? How come? Does money buy one’s way out of crime?
Recall what Microsoft has been doing to Novell all these years. Ron Hovsepian has certainly chosen to forget it all. Once again, Novell chickens out, takes some money, kiss and makes up with the monopoly abuser. It this this in November 2006 as well.
Correction: It turns out that this is an old story, so some of the arguments made above are misjudged, due to erroneous dating in the press release.
Send this to a friend 
Maureen O’Gara is still highly delusional and she’s posting bogus articles about Novell selling UNIX to SCO before the trial and even dropping its case against SCO. It’s amazing what disinformation can reach the ‘tubes’ nowadays, especially when one is self-publishing (without peers, let alone an editor).
Content is available under CC-BY-SA