Summary: The remainder of this week’s news about Novell
There is almost nothing to see here but a few minor items.
Permalink
Comments off 
Send this to a friend
Summary: A glimpse at distributors who pay Microsoft for GNU/Linux
FOR SUSE it has been an exceptionally quiet week, but SUSE Studio still generates a bit of a buzz and there are also reviews that are largely positive.
Permalink
Comments off Send this to a friend
Summary: New release, Google Summer of Code projects, and little more about the OpenSUSE project
THE most major development this week (other than what was mentioned last night) is probably this release of the fifth milestone of OpenSUSE 11.2, which was not covered so widely.
Permalink
Comments off Send this to a friend
Summary: Microsoft fined $40 million for misconduct and Gary Odom misrepresents Oregon
EARLIER today we wrote about ODF FUD which the Microsoft crowd was spreading using the i4i patent case. O’Gara and Sys-Con [1, 2] have unsurprisingly joined this slime parade against ODF and meanwhile we also come to discover that Microsoft was fined an extra $40,000,000 for misconduct at the i4i trial.
The judge who banned Microsoft from selling its Word document program in the U.S. due to a patent violation tacked an additional $40 million onto a jury’s $200 million verdict because the software maker’s lawyers engaged in trial misconduct, court records reveal.
Speaking of misconduct, “Patent Hawk” is back in the news. He used to work on behalf of Microsoft, but later on he sued the company and then sued another 27 companies for patent infringement. We last wrote about him a few months ago and here’s the latest scoop.
Patent Hawk Files Supreme Court Brief On Behalf Of All Oregon; Oregon Officials Say ‘Who?’
You may recall that a guy named Gary Odom, who refers to himself often in the third person as “Patent Hawk,” has been known to stop by here every so often to insult us without ever, you know, backing up a point. His day job is helping companies do patent/prior art searches. Last year, he made a bit of news by suing Microsoft for a patent he held on “editable toolbars” (exciting stuff). Microsoft later accused him of violating a contract, in that Odom (whoops) had worked for Microsoft, and had an agreement about not filing for certain types of patents, or asserting them against Microsoft.
It is a sordid mess caused by the above which puts the patent system as a whole in bad light and popularises the movement for a much-needed reform. This system only protects the private territory of established companies. █
Permalink
Comments off Send this to a friend
Summary: New OpenSUSE team not likely to elevate the project, but Novell tries it anyway
Novell is not a bad company when it comes to PR. It is only to be expected from a company of that scale. At the moment, Novell is trying to take advantage of that whole “Open Thing”, so it created a new avenue to disseminate the illusion of a company where customers and partners get to determine the directions adopted by decision makers. There is at least one report about it already, such as this one.
Novell has announced that all partners and users will have access to the product development portal. If you’re agitating for an enhancement, here’s your chance to push it through.
There is more of the same “community”/”open” meme elsewhere, also inside the Mono team at Boston (where most of the Microsoft-Novell stuff is done nowadays, to distinguish from OpenSUSE).
“Haeger also said secrecy was a culprit.”An kinder, more open Novell? That would truly be something. After Ted Haeger had left Novell he wrote: “I removed the statement about my departure having nothing to do with the deal. It was a false statement made without consulting me. I did not want to make my departure a statement about the deal, but by using my name in this way on this page, it forces me to state a correction. My departure did have something to do with the Novell-MS deal. I would likely still be at Novell if it had not happened. I prefer to focus on the positive side of why I left, so please do not cite my departure as unrelated to the MS-Novell deal.”
Haeger also said secrecy was a culprit. Earlier today, our reader Marti told us that “most people of SuSE G.M.B.H. ran away when it became part of Novell (read it in interviews).”
Here is a new article from IDG:
We should all be used to seeing open-source companies acquired by now but what is interesting is how many of the bigger deals have been problematic. Look at Novell-Suse where Suse founder Hubert Mantel left within two years of Novell picking up the German Linux distro, reportedly saying “This is no longer the company I founded 13 years ago”.
Those who were more adamant and stubborn probably could not bear the thought of working for a proprietary (or “mixed”) software company like Novell. Some existing SUSE people are even using Macs. New sighting:
From time to time I use Mac OS X and I really like the application management with its dock.
Novell is now forming a new team, arranging what it considers to be full-time staff (paid ‘community’) for OpenSUSE. The Register and Heise have the details.
Novell has created an openSUSE Team within the company with a team of ten experts exclusively dedicated to the openSUSE project; the move is aimed at increasing Novell’s support of the community distribution.
It should not be forgotten that Novell laid off many SUSE employees not so long ago. This seems like a partly PR-motivated step.
Linux distributor Novell is reorganizing: from now on, one developer team will dedicate itself entirely to openSUSE.
Here is the original message from Roland Haidl (also here).
It is no news that the OpenSUSE community is on shaky grounds amid notable departures [1, 2]. The “People of openSUSE” series is still delivered very sporadically, not once a week as it used to prior to a long draught. The OpenSUSE weekly newsletter for this week is also accompanied by a public call for more regular cycles in finalisation.
We publish the Weekly News each Saturday after proofreading.
What serves as another sign of stagnation begins with the following message:
[opensuse-announce] Advance notice of discontinuation of openSUSE 10.3
Dear opensuse-announce subscribers and openSUSE users,
SUSE Security announces that openSUSE 10.3 will be discontinued soon. Having provided security-relevant fixes for two years, we will stop releasing updates after October 31st 2009.
As a consequence, the openSUSE 10.3 distribution directory on our server download.opensuse.org will be removed from /distribution/10.3/ to free space on our mirror sites. The 10.3 directory in the update tree /update/10.3 will follow, as soon as all updates have been published.
The discontinuation of openSUSE 10.3 enables us to focus on the openSUSE distributions of a newer release dates to ensure that our users can continuously take advantage of the quality that they are used to with openSUSE products.
This announcement holds true for openSUSE 10.3 only. As usual, Novell/SUSE will continue to provide update packages for the following products:
openSUSE 11.0 (supported until June 30th 2010)
openSUSE 11.1 (supported until December 31st 2010)
openSUSE 11.2 (currently in development, to be released November 12th 2009) for the next two openSUSE releases plus two months overlap period.Please note that the maintenance cycles of SUSE Linux Enterprise products and products based on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system are not affected by this announcement and have longer life cycles.
To learn more about SUSE Linux business products, please visit http://www.novell.com/linux/suse/ . For a detailed list of the life cycles of our Enterprise Products please visit http://support.novell.com/lifecycle/ and http://support.novell.com/lifecycle/lcSearchResults.jsp?sl=suse
If you have any questions regarding this announcement, please do not hesitate to contact SUSE Security at <security@suse.de>.
The Register — much like other publications — covered this too and also mentioned the future release:
This week, the openSUSE project said that it had reached Milestone 5, with openSUSE 11.2 now based on the Linux 2.6.31-rc4 kernel and supporting the Xen 3.4.1 RC10 and VirtualBox 3.0.2 hypervisors, the Gnome 2.27.5 and KDE 4.3 graphical user interfaces, and a slew of updated packages that you can read all about here.
The whole shebang is built using the GNU GCC 4.4.1 compilers. You can download openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 5 here for x86 and x64 machines. This is still beta code, and not intended for production environments, of course.
But buried among all these events was this important observation that the OpenSUSE support window is shrinking rather than expanding.
The issue of how long a Linux distribution will support a release is one that tends to go back and forth. Novell’s openSUSE Linux is now revising its policy.
Starting with the openSUSE 11.2, maintenance support will be approximately 18 months which is a reduction of 6 months from what openSUSE 11.1 and prior releases, offered users.
To make matters worse, releases too have become less frequent (about 8 months apart).
Novell’s so-called ally uses this type of stuff to spread FUD about future prospects.
MS comes out swinging
Microsoft SA yesterday kicked off its annual Partner Summit conference in Durban, with MD Mteto Nyati laying down the gauntlet as far as the company’s goals and competitors are concerned.
[...]
The company is heavily targeting the public sector going forward. “Look at Novell,” Nyati said. “In the public sector space it has a huge install base, and it has publically shared the fact that there is no roadmap for its product beyond 2010. We need to go share that with our customers. They need to move from that platform to something else. Instead of them moving to Lotus Notes or something else, let’s help them move to the right platform.”
With ‘partners’ like these, Novell must really feel proud and confident. How foolish a deal Novell has gotten itself into. █
Permalink
Comments off Send this to a friend
Summary: Additional new signs and observations regarding security of the next operating system from Microsoft
WE wrote a lot about this subject in the past. Vista 7′s illusion of security is listed by SJVN as reason #1 to avoid Vista 7.
1) Windows 7 still has all the security of a drunken teenager in a sports car. From Windows for Workgroups and NT 3 until today, Windows is a security joke. It used to be that running Windows just put your head into the noose. Now, millions of lazy Windows users are the reason why the Internet is a mess. If you already do all the right things to keep XP running safely, you’re not going to get any safer by buying Windows 7.
That’s just Windows alone, before any malicious software is even installed on it. Here is the latest relevant example:
Digsby takes bundled crapware to a whole different level, however. During the install you are prompted for not one, not two, but six different pieces of junk software, and then for good measure they offer to replace your home page with something terrible and take your search engine down a notch.
Slashdot summarises it as follows:
The money-making distributed computing software is in addition to six “crapware” apps that users must refuse during installation. The terms of service that no one ever reads does describe the CPU- and bandwidth-robbing moneymaker, and its off switch is located behind the “Support Digsby” menu item.
It is junk software like the above which sometimes lowers the apparent cost of preinstalled Windows. But the real cost is sometimes a long-term equation, which makes GNU/Linux a much smarter investment. █
Permalink
Comments off Send this to a friend
Where I come from, we call that a de-lusion. And it is pretty typical of Mac Lovers, to be delusional about their operating system and their hardware. But they should not feel bad. It is also typical of Windows users. They think their system is great, that it works fine, and that they have not been assimilated into the Microsoft Borg.
The results are plain to see. All three of the big names – Fedora 11 ‘Leonidas’, Ubuntu ‘Jaunty Jackalope’ and Mandriva 2009.1 ‘Spring’ – have taken different approaches to reducing boot times, and boy has it worked. Booting up is also much cleaner, with service start-up messages hidden behind beautifully crafted splash screens. The desktop itself loads in about 30 seconds, and the remainder continues to load in the background, which is exactly how things should be.
I have paid for at least 10 Windows licenses over time, all the machines were purchased to run only FreeBSD.
We must stop this distortion and Lenovo would not reimburse the Vista license for my new laptop, I have chosen to sue them.
In this podcast, ZDNet.com.au staffers Renai LeMay and Chris Duckett discuss why they use Linux full time where they can and what they like and don’t like about it.
First up is Always On PC. Sweet and secure, Always On PC presents you with a full Linux GNOME desktop environment with 2GB of storage via a Java-based Virtual Network Computing (VNC) console. It’s a full-blown desktop system, and it’s Linux. If you aren’t a Linux user, you might want to pass on this one. However, if your heart belongs to Linux, you’re set.
IBM today announced the System z Solution Edition Series, seven combined packages it says are designed to assist customers migrate off older HP and Sun Unix systems and onto IBM’s mainframes running Linux.
Kroah-Hartman said Linux has reached mainstream status on the desktop, at least on the enterprise space. “There are very large companies that are well known users of Linux in this manner: all of the movie companies, Ford, Peugeot, all of the Wall Street companies, almost all banks [and] the stock exchanges,” he said.
According to Far, Mac OS X runs “a little faster than Vista” with an SSD drive, but Linux is “always faster” than Vista or Mac OS X – to the tune of 1 percent to 2 percent – because like Windows 2000, “it never runs anything in the background.”
Migration Path: HP-UX and Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and multicore Intel Xeon processor based servers
Linux is the OS of choice for an increasing number of embedded devices. Markets for devices such as home automation systems and health monitoring, which previously did not require an OS, are now adopting Linux as a way to provide enhanced product features at low cost.
[...]
Maciej Halasz is director of product management at Timesys Corporation, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Palm has responded to the story that its Pre handset was beaming information back to customers – insisting that it offers ways to turn off the collecting ‘services’.
Joey Hess’ ‘Shy Jo blog showed codes being sent back to Palm, but the company insists that the information only includes information about “potential scenarios in which we might use a customer’s information, all toward a goal of offering a great user experience”.
A whole new era for Veterans Affairs VistA has begun with Kevin Toppenberg, MD’s new TMG-CPRS 1.0.26.76 (TMG v1.1) client. The new tmg-cprs client enables clinical notes to be rendered in html.
Mozilla Labs has added collaboration services to the latest version of its cloud-based development project – Bespin.
Mozilla has released the first alpha of Firefox 3.6. Ars takes a look at the new features, such as CSS gradients.
Entering the ECM market with an open source product gave Chalef a leg up. The ECM world of documents and files has few open source options in it, according to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, analyst at CMS Watch.
In short, while the company’s web content management software is not open source, Day Software makes use of and contributes to a number of community open source projects, such as Apache Jackrabbit, Apache Sling, and Apache Felix. In fact, as the company notes: “in total, Day Software contributes to over 12 Apache projects and 25 open source projects. www.ohloh.org, an independent website that tracks open source contributions, shows that over 75% of Day engineers are active committers to open source projects.”
Back in October, I promised to keep marketing and sales out of this blog. We wanted to concentrate on technical topics and to choose signal over noise. Mostly, that’s meant that I let other people do the writing.
In a world where the standard is provided as such an open source reference model (under GPLv3), then you’ll need the creation of an assurance industry to provide end user assurance that providers still match the standard (despite of any competitive modifications or operational improvements). This is how you create a truly competitive marketplace and by encouraging diversity overcome the most dangerous risk of all which is systemic failure in the cloud.
We have already staked the ground with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, our intention is to continue to push this and create truly competitive markets in the cloud using the only viable mechanism – open source. Of course, this is at the infrastructure layer of the computing stack. Our attention will shortly turn towards the platform.
EvoRSR is object-oriented, modular, and freely available at http://biotech.bmi.ac.cn/EvoRSR under the GNU/GPL license.
It may have taken the (very) long way to get there, but it looks like at least some folks over at Sony have figured out that openness can be a competitive advantage, and have decided to support the open ePub ebook format for its ebook reader.
In their submission, Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) have expressed concern that “the proposed legislation provides a very broad exception to the prohibition on interception of network communications for the purposes of ensuring that a network is “appropriately used”".
There’s been a push by people both inside and outside the government to get public court documents out to the public. As it stands now, most court documents can be found via PACER, the court system’s own online service, which charges $0.08 per page. PACER notes that it’s charging for the documents to cover its own costs of managing its system, but this still bothers many who don’t like the fact that important public domain case law is so costly. There are some private services, like Justia trying to fill the void, and Carl Malamud is pushing hard to get the government to put public documents up for the public to read.
If the RIAA can’t stop music sharing, the U.S. government is going to have an even harder time trying to stop the sharing of federal court documents hidden behind a paywall. Those documents aren’t protected by copyright law.
Thomas Batrol, computational neuroscientist for the Salk Institute 04 (2005)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
Permalink
Comments off Send this to a friend
ONE of our readers has spotted the following Slashvertisement a few hours ago. He sent us the following screenshot from Slashdot (tip: disable AdBlock it you cannot see it).
We wrote about this programme last month because Novell should concentrate on poaching customers from Microsoft/Windows, not from GNU/Linux. But Microsoft wants Red Hat eliminated and VMware+SpringSource (not just Novell) might help. █
Permalink
Comments off Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Guest Editorial Team
Community: Get involved
RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates
Site Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content
IRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time
Design by Beccary and Weblogs.us
·
Valid XHTML
·
Valid CSS
·
Website Hosting by Co Pilot Co · Part of Bytes Media
