Microsoft Corp. will distribute free software to nonprofit groups to boost charity in India, a company official said Monday.
The software donation will be routed through a technology assistance program that India’s NASSCOM Foundation is offering in partnership with TechSoup, a San Francisco-based group that partners in charity work with companies like Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Symantec.
NASSCOM Foundation, the philanthropy arm of the trade body of technology companies operating in India, introduced the program Monday – titled BiG Tech.
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Nearly 35,000 nonprofit groups in India will be eligible for such software donations.
Charity, eh? To 35,000 nonprofit groups. I was lucky to spot this because I’ve systematically been watching Microsoft news for the past two years. This one seemingly big event did not make big waves at the time. It went on quietly outside the scope of the press (Associated Press being the exception) — something which I can quite clearly recall made me even more suspicious back then. I informed some people about this suspicion.
Only yesterday we mentioned the latest fiasco (a new revelation) from India.
You are encouraged to see both incidents and consider some of the later writings that we finally find. Here is one:
Of course, there has to be some trade-offs, because there should never be free lunch, even for the ones who starve: Microsoft, according to this article, has conditioned its help to Indian NGOs to their support of OOXML. What the NGOs had to do was to send letters of support on OOXML to the federal government of India.
How many of these 35,000 nonprofits could potentially overwhelm the national standards body? More information about this latest incident can be found here and hopefully we will find some press coverage soon. The press typically shies away from such controversy. Some of it is literally owned by Bill Gates or Microsoft.
‘Charity’ in exchange for lock-in and favours? Where else have we seen this before? Start here and follow the citations:
Next time people tell you about all those nice investments donations from Microsoft, ask yourself whether Microsoft gets something in return for those investments donations. █
Novell today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire PlateSpin Ltd. This acquisition will extend Novell’s leadership position in the next-generation data center by providing the only solution to dynamically deliver business critical services across both physical and virtual infrastructures.
Networking software firm Novell is to acquire PlateSpin, a virtualisation provider specialising in data centres. Novell hopes the purchase of PlateSpin will strengthen its position in the next-generation data centre market by enabling it to provide business critical services across both physical and virtual infrastructures. A value of the deal was not disclosed.
Earlier this month, Novell announced the acquisition of SiteScape, a provider of team workspace and real-time conferencing solutions. Let’s view this acquisition through the lens of key industry megatrends: telco convergence, social networking, and open source.
Finance
Novell’s financial results seemed positive, they lifted the stock, and expectations for times ahead seemed brighter. It is hard, however to believe what counts as Linux revenue because of the cook-booking practices we mentioned before. In any event, here is the Reuters article which covers it.
Business software maker Novell Inc on Thursday reported a quarterly net profit that beat Wall Street estimates on lower costs and a 65 percent increase in sales of its Linux open source software and services.
The company also raised its revenue outlook for the year, and its shares rose 4.7 percent in extended trade.
Prior to joining FormFactor, Mr. Foster was CFO for JDS Uniphase for a two-year period, preceded by his time as CFO for Novell Corporation. He also served as Vice President and Operations Controller for Applied Materials and spent over ten years with Hewlett Packard in a variety of financial roles.
That’s enough to make anyone quit their job and become a Googler. Masie did. He left his job as managing director of IT company Novell to head Google in South Africa.
Masie spent four years as the head of Novell SA. He joined the company in 1996 as product marketing director, then as global business strategist for Novell Inc and then global corporate technology strategist in 2001. In 2003, he was made managing director of the company.
There is also this article which talks about Novell’s Matt Bowman, but it’s quite minor.
PROVO — For anyone who’s ever told a relative or friend that fun activities don’t exist in Utah County, a newly invented race may alter some of those thoughts.
During a Chamber of Commerce meeting, Matt Bowman, marketing director for Novell, heard distressed small-business owners complain that they couldn’t generate demand for the products or services they offered.
Novell today announced the availability of SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Point of Service, the latest version of Novell’s Linux* solution optimized for retail computing environments. SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service allows retailers to customize and manage point of service (POS) systems, reducing their in-store and data center costs while increasing system flexibility and reliability.
Overall I think Linux needs to be offered on all notebooks for an operating system option, if for nothing more than giving consumers another alternative to Windows.
Another review was published only moments ago. From the review, which is more fact-based than experience/pet peeve-based:
One big deterrent to installing Linux on laptops has been the difficulty in finding drivers for hardware components, whether they are new, not mainstream, or just not have Linux support. With pre-installed Linux laptops, that is no longer as big a factor, since the assumption is that Lenovo has tested each component to ensure they work, and has drivers available.
Here is a new video of Frank Kohler, Novell’s Virtualization Project Manager.
Other Products
The following item is not truly about Novell, but the product has roots in Novell, much like WordPerfect. It is getting replaced.
SVSU has used CardMail since the fall of 2000. CardMail was purchased by SVSU from NetMail, which was owned by Novell at the time. Current problems with the system are due to that the system is not up to today’s standards and difficult to maintain.
Many students are unhappy with CardMail’s inconsistency.
“As a student and organization leader on campus, it has been very difficult to communicate efficiently,” said senior Jandrew Gonzales.
Novell’s GroupWise gets potentially Integrated with SugarCRM, courtesy of Omni.
“Strong Novell technology partners like Omni add significant customer value and enhance the ROI of Novell collaboration solutions,” said Wendy Steinle, director of Workgroup Solutions marketing for Novell. “Riva CRM Integration serves a long-standing need of GroupWise users by providing access to mission-critical, line-of-business information directly from within the GroupWise client. Riva leverages the proven security, scalability and reliability of GroupWise and extends the value potential with its robust and open API set.”
Hotel Technology Next Generation Conference — The Novell-led Bandit(TM) project today announced a solution to help address one of the major business challenges faced by hotel and hospitality enterprises — how to cost effectively connect disparate systems to streamline administration and comply with regulatory requirements. Using open source, the Bandit project has written a reference implementation based on Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG) standards that will bridge various systems and platforms in an enterprise, including legacy systems, with commercially available identity management software.
The more major news comes in the next post which covers acquisitions and Novell’s latest financial report. █
Following John Bridgman’s talk at FOSDEM, Egbert Eich, who is one of the Novell developers working on the RadeonHD driver, had talked about the status of the RadeonHD driver.
OpenSUSE still has an upper hand it would seem when it come to KDE4 as a Live CD.
KDE 4 is in a word, cool. You don’t have to take my word for it, though. You can download your own test drive copy from KDE 4 Live CD. This is a live openSUSE 10.x CD with KDE 4.x on it. If you like what you see, you can install the live CD snapshot onto your hard drive by going to System->Administrator Settings->Miscellaneous->Live Installer. You can customize the installation by selecting the Change button or you can click Accept to use the default parameters and begin the install process immediately.
Francis Giannaros unleashed the 11th newsletter of OpenSUSE:
Issue 11 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out! [0]
In this week’s issue:
* Factory Live CDs Now Available
* FOSDEM 2008 is Over
* Mono Hack Week Summary
* In Tips and Tricks: How to fix the Amarok Update Problems; How
to try out openSUSE releases with VirtualBox
* In the Press: SUSE Linux on the ThinkPad T61 Review; Compiz wins
“Window Manager of the Year” Award
When I was at SCALE the weekend before last I caught up with Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier. It was Zonker’s 8th day on the job as the OpenSUSE community manager and we talked about his plans and thoughts regarding the new position.
Continuing the ‘People of openSUSE’ series, this time we have the pleasure to meet openSUSE Member Rossana Motta, well-know among SuSELinuxSupport forum users.
Here comes another good example that demonstrates Novell’s loveaffair with Mono.
Tasky, another good tool, another bad idea
Because it’s written in C#. And guess what? Copyright (C) 2007 Novell, Inc.
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No word about dependencies. No word about Mono. Nothing alarming in the Goals section.
[...]
Now you know. In that f–ing Novell’s Hackweek they could have started a new project in a different way — but no, they wanted it in Mono!
As we emphasised before (based on Novell interviews), Novell puts its cards on Mono [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33], careless about the consequences that apply to other GNOME-based GNU/Linux distributions. Microsoft must be watching from afar with glee. █
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