Hardware monopolist with bribery and charity abuse under in its
belt (recent past) openly accepts GPL abusers

ALTHOUGH it is hard to crticise Intel when the context is GNU/Linux, the company's crimes are known to many and even recognised in several continents. For those who are new to Intel's antitrust situation and kickbacks, we provide some links at the top.

As a little bit of background, Intel recently rejected -- or in other words thrown away -- Ubuntu in favour of Fedora inside Moblin (Intel's mobile Linux stack). Here is some exemplary coverage.

Dirk Hohndel, Intel's director of Linux and open-source strategy, told The Reg there was no falling out with Ubuntu, but the move to Fedora was a technical decision based on the desire to adopt RPM for package management.

It turns out now that Intel has just welcomed the Microsoft-tied Novell and Microsoft-tied Turbolinux (both use RPM). This translates to an approach towards Microsoft 'patent tax'. Here is the announcement about Novell.

Novell to offer Linux-based solutions optimized for Intel* Atom* Processor-based netbooks; will deliver the best user experience yet through Moblin

[...]

Moblin.org is an open source community for sharing software technologies to create an untethered computing experience across Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), netbooks, and embedded devices using computing hardware based on Intel* Atom* Processor Technology. Novell's focus is on effectively meeting the requirements of hardware vendors choosing the Intel Atom processor technology for their netbooks to deliver solutions with greatly accelerated boot performance, longer battery life and an optimized experience for netbook users.

"The Moblin open source project brings a fused group of partners together to create the most optimized netbook and nettop solution yet," said Roger Levy, vice president open platform solutions at Novell.

That's the very same guy who brags about intellectual property "peace of mind", i.e. payments to Microsoft for imaginary software patents. So here we have a combination of two close Microsoft partners, which engage in exclusionary and collusive conduct with a monopolist. This spoils the fun at a software level and hardware level alike. And according to OStatic, it's the same with Turbolinux, which is part of Microsoft's pro-OOXML crusade and software patents campaign [1, 2] (against Free software). OStatic also reports on the Manbo (Mandriva-Turbolinux) situation.

Mandriva and Turbolinux Join Moblin, Create Manbo Labs

[...]

What's particularly interesting about this announcement is once the Manbo engineers create these core components, they are delivered to the two sponsoring projects for further development, add-ons, and customizations. Mandriva and Turbolinux have hinted that more partnerships in Manbo Labs are on the horizon.

I warmly recommend Mandriva, but knowing the dangers of swapping code with Microsoft partners, Mandriva hopefully knows what it's doing. Sharing code with Turbolinux, as opposed to just RPMs, would not be a good idea, but Mandriva reassured to us that there is no problem here [1, 2, 3, 4]. ⬆