Think of this as somewhat of a spillover that contains various unrelated topics, and primarily news from the past week.
Novell in China
Articles about Dell, Microsoft and Novell continue to come. It’s an interesting relationship that remains wrapped as somewhat of a mystery because of vague patent agreements. This new article is about China.
Novell and Dell announced to expand Linux offerings with the addition of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 installed on Dell OptiPlex 330 and 755 business desktop PCs in China. The systems will be available later this year.
Steve Ballmer at Microsoft can be quite eccentric at times — although in fairness he is apparently an unassuming family man who is a decent cove — and the mention of the operating system Linux makes him come over strange.
Watch the photo.
SCO
In case you wish to catch up with the latest on SCO (Novell is still very much involved), read this article.
In a similar case, Andreas Kuckartz, a German Linux advocate, had been publicly stating since 2003 that “SCO IP Licenses for Linux” amounted to little more than “protection money pricelists” and that SCO is “spreading rumors about copyright violations in Linux.” Further, Kuckartz claimed that “The SCO Group Inc. is probably is involved in crimes such as stock manipulation and filing a fraudulent complaint against IBM.”
Shares of Novell Inc. rose Monday after the Waltham, Mass., software maker received an upgrade to buy from neutral from UBS Investment Research.
The stock gained 3.7% to $7.06 in midday trades. Shares are now up almost 14% year-to-date. UBS also lifted the 12-month price target for the stock to $9 from $8.50.
There are a variety of new GroupWise videos. One is worth a quick mention, but there’s nothing exciting to see here really.
There has not been much Novell buzz in the audio/video world recently. Bear in mind that such material often comes from fans and supporters. It’s not the press.
The council consolidated its Microsoft and Novell server environment using Res Wisdom software, in an attempt to get a uniform build across the organisation.
Founding members of the ITCC include leading IT corporations HP, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, and Sun; the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) and the Linux Professional Institute (LPI); test development and delivery providers Pearson VUE and Prometric; and education provider Kaplan.
With the seamless integration of Identity Manager and Sentinel 6 from Novell, plus the automated financial controls test library from Greenlight Technologies, into the DoubleCheck™ GRC&T Enterprise Solution, DoubleCheck™ can address both the IT and Financial audit and testing needs of the Enterprise for any company in any industry. In addition, the benefits of the DoubleCheck™ / Novell® IT-GRC&T Solution can be maximized by utilizing the professional consulting and implementation services offered by GR Consulting.
Demonstrating its commitment to helping enterprise customers address critical compliance needs, Novell is expanding its identity management solution with a Roles Based Provisioning Module. Stringent privacy policies and continually changing government regulations are driving forces for enterprises to utilize role management as part of their identity infrastructure.
Some of you may wonder why I didn’t include Novell in this list. Had I been writing this post straight after the Sun announcement it would have been. But not long after the announcement I came across this post from an identity management group blog at Novell, which discusses how the company has been building its own role management capabilities, focused on role provisioning, exploiting its directory heritage (discussed in more detail in our assessment here) and partnership with Eurekify for role discovery and analysis. The post’s author claims no knowledge of acquisition talks. Then lo and behold, and far be it from me to suggest that Sun’s announcement had anything to do with the timing, the next day Novell announced its new Roles Based Provisioning Module.
Of course, a Eurekify acquisition by Novell could still be on the cards, despite the blogger’s ignorance of any such discussions, but it seems to me based on Novell’s stated strategy that the Israeli company is more likely to end up in the arms of CA or IBM.
Novell today announced enhancements to its single sign-on solution, including support for Windows Vista, improved authentication capabilities, easier administration and expanded applications support.
Privacy Networks, the email solutions company, today announced they have made their industry leading PrivacyVault solution available for Novell GroupWise.
So really the big basic difference is that Ubuntu is a simplified cookie cutter distribution designed to not overwhelm the new user with choice. openSUSE on the other hand is the polar opposite offering choices for every aspect of Linux computing. openSUSE is very scalable and it can be as easy or advanced as one needs. You could install openSUSE on a dozen machines and none be the same if that was your wish, whereas install Ubuntu on a dozen machines and it would be exactly alike except some might not be able to connect to the internet.
As stated at the beginning, there really isn’t much of a comparison between these two distros as they are so vastly different in target audience, capabilities, and philosophies. If you are a brand new Linux user perhaps you should get your feet wet with Ubuntu as openSUSE might seem a bit overwhelming. After a coupla weeks and you begin to feel claustrophobic, then branch out to try openSUSE. If you have any Linux or advanced Windows experience, then you might prefer the functionality found in openSUSE.
In the second part Reinhard Max describes Asterick, an open source telephony engine and tool kit, where to find packages for openSUSE and its usage within Novell.
Funny misspelling of “Asterisk” in both sites (the referrer and the original).
As for the last item, it isn’t entirely clear what version of SUSE is used, but a business in the UK will have it preinstalled
Shuttle Inc., the market leader in the Mini-PC sector and manufacturer of Multi-Form-Factor solutions, is now also selling its Mini-PCs with the Linux Operating System in the UK.
Update: there are some more related news items which were forgotten. Namely:
OpenSUSE gets its board set up independently from Novell.
Novell has recently decided to start setting openSUSE free from direct Novell oversight by setting up the first openSUSE board of directors.
That should come in handy for Novell, should there ever actually be any patent infringement attack from Microsoft, because you now have a clear demarcation line.
Novell’s work on an open source ATI/AMD driver continues. It helps the community of Linux users as a whole.
Yesterday we received word from Novell’s Matthias Hopf that the 2D portion of the RadeonHD driver will not be stable by the end of the year. After publishing that news article, we heard some new details from Luc Verhaegen, who is also part of Novell’s X driver development team.
The new interview with Bill Hilf, whom we do not consider trustworthy, says quite a bit about Microsoft’s tactics and its future plans. Don’t listen only to what Microsoft tells you, but ask yourself what it is not telling you. The same goes for Novell and the rest of the Microsoft apologists.
From the interview:
The real value of open source from Microsoft is understanding how community developed software can happen on our platform and help grow our business as well as the open source community, which is how we started off on this whole path of launching things like Port25 and CodePlex, and which is why I submitted the licenses to the OSI.
Here is what Groklaw says: “See? I told you. They are trying to get the community to divide up into Red Hat and the GPL and Novell and others who will help them compete against Red Hat. Very nice. Not. Why would anyone help them?”
That is precisely what we have argued all along. Novell is dividing the community along with Microsoft. It is not Web sites such as this which lead to division. Microsoft had all of this planned and Novell took a lot of money to be part of Microsoft’s game. Even smaller companies, as we have seen a few days ago, are lending a hand to Microsoft’s claims that it owns part of Linux (intellectual property). Keep an eye on Google's Androidbecause Microsoft has some plans.
The question, of course, is why Kyocera Mita would need a patent from Microsoft to enhance products built on embedded Linux. Is it adding proprietary Microsoft technology on top of embedded Linux?
Could be…
Or is this a case of Kyocera Mita accepting a claim by Microsoft that embedded Linux is among the 235 open source technologies Microsoft insists it owns.
Microsoft had a key idea. It’s the idea that if you fool, terrorise and even bribe enough companies, then market perceptions can be changed and rules be rewritten to benefit Microsoft. The least one can do is prevent Microsoft from rewriting the laws by shunning those who assist Microsoft.
Posted in Boycott Novell at 10:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
GPLv3: not only because 3 > 2
You can just about visualise a nice linear curve going through the pace of growth chart of GPLv3, as seen in Palamida’s latest report.
Our LGPL v3 count has increased by 1 project, bringing the current count to 95 LGPL v3 projects. The GPL v2 or later list has also passed a large milestone of 6000 GPL v2 or later projects. Over the last week, 76 new GPL v2 or later projects have been added, bringing the count to 6034 GPL v2 or later projects.
It looks like GPLv3 is a force to be reckoned with. Sun seems to be happy with it and the same goes for other large companies.
Reader Anthony Sabatini of New York writes to tell me that the auto-text patent asserted by Acacia subsidiary AutoText in Cleveland might be invalid in light of the Control Data Corp CDC6600 console system developed two decades earlier.
[...]
Finally, IP Innovation and Technology Licensing Corp. — in other words, ACACIA — filed a lawsuit in Marshall against Google, accusing Google’s search engine and Google Earth of infringing two patents. This is the same Acacia sub that sued Red Hat and Novell over Linux, with the same lawyers – Johnny Ward and Eric Albritton. But these are different patents. The patents asserted against Google are 5,276,785 and 5,675,819, which Acacia got from Xerox. Nice going, Xerox.
You see? So, companies inherit the patents of companies that actually have products and then absorb the bad image on their behalf. They can also do their fights, by proxy. Haven’t we all learned that from SCO?
A federal appeals court on Thursday turned down a request by Vonage Holdings to reconsider a lower court verdict that it infringed two patents held by Verizon Communications.
One of the readers found some very interesting bits to add:
Most readers are probably not aware of my activities in other places, which include GNU/Linux advocacy and exposing Microsoft’s frauds in a very responsible way (always with decent references). I’ve just been informed by a reader that a site of mine had been blacklisted after persistent slander. I wrote about it in my blog.
So SCO tried to gag Groklaw beginning in 2004. It moved on to false insinuations to journalists, ugly innuendo during a conference about me and Groklaw, having friendly journalists with PIs try to dig up dirt on me, a massive astroturfing campaign all over the internet, and then finally to intimidation with their recent motion. Well, I’m gagging, all right, but not in a good way, and certainly not in the way SCO hoped.
I will respond like this, seriously for a moment. This is America. I am an American citizen. I was born here, born to certain rights as my birthright. I’m allowed to cover this litigation without being harassed and intimidated or threatened or gagged. I’m allowed to present facts that disprove SCO’s public allegations. I am allowed to write what I believe is the truth, and I’m to present research about the allegations.
Someone ought to get to the bottom of this. BoycottNovell.com was also accused (falsely of course) of launching DDOS attacks. How about Rob Enderle’s recent attempt to attribute death threats to Groklaw? Companies and their proxies know no boundaries (Rob Enderle works with Microsoft as his client).
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