Thanks, Novell

"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."

--Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO

ABOUT a year ago, Microsoft Australia sent an employee to a local LUG (Sydney Linux User Group, among others) in order to talk about patents and such issues. It was not an isolated incident because there are prior ones (2007) that indirectly involved Novell's patent deal. Attendees were far from impressed and the most recently reported talk took place after Microsoft had already corrupted the nation [1, 2, 3, 4] in its pursuit for ISO approval.

Once again, as we repeatedly point out, Microsoft not only invades conferences that are about "open source"; it even invades those that are about GNU/Linux, which it very much hates and fears. It wants it replaced and it tries to mislead Australian people. Here is a report about LCA2009:

Crumpton, platform strategy manager at Microsoft Australia, had no idea of the passionate questioning he would come up against when he gave his talk, the last for the day, at a mini-conference titled "The Business of Open Source."

Humour and deprecatory remarks are generally adopted when one tries to make oneself comfortable in an uncomfortable situation, and Crumpton went it whole hog.

Novell is often used as Microsoft's 'ticket' to enter and subvert the agenda of such conferences. We provided evidence of this in the past. And in fact, based on the coverage from Sam Varghese, Novell is there at LCA2009 too.

This morning in the Dutch press, it's the same type of charade. Novell is being used to lump Microsoft together with "open source" or "Linux". We have no proper translation of this news article, but there is some automated translation from Google:

The sudden peace between Microsoft and Novell has a similar debate, but the cooperation is now under way. "We also want to reach customers who use Linux," says a senior manager, Michael Fox of Microsoft.

To Novell, there is nothing funny here. After all, Novell, like Microsoft, is predominantly a proprietary software company. They share common goals, none of which account for freedom or ethics. They want to sell "patent royalties" (Microsoft's terminology), which Novell conveniently calls "vouchers". ⬆