12.20.09
Accurate Coverage of Novell
“Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies”
Summary: Few new articles accurately describe what is really happening at Novell and what the legal terms really are when it comes to Moonlight
“DOWNHILL” is where Novell is going [1, 2], but Novell’s PR department works hard to hide it and therefore instill confidence in the minds of prospective customers. We have already shown the lies and the spin in the press, but now we shall show some positive examples that are very, very few.
Ulrich Bantle hits the nail on the head with an accurate description of what Novell is doing at the moment:
In January 2010 Novell will consolidate four business units down to two and eventually say farewell to managers Jeff Jaffee and Roger Levy.
[...]
If the restructuring has larger human resource implications is not something Novell is currently revealing.
Actually, Novell will not exactly “say farewell to managers Jeff Jaffee [sic] and Roger Levy.” They are quitting by all indications, shortly after Novell reported more than $200,000,000 in losses.
“People deserve to know the truth and reporters should not be pressured (or bullied) to tell lies and glorify Novell.”Novell has a dilemma in its hands. Novell is deep in trouble, but the staff cannot just say it like this to shareholders, to whom they have an obligation to lie to the press (making the investors confident while delivering obligatory status messages). It is the job of journalists to actually interpret — given context — what lies beneath the PR and the spin, then actually objectively tell the story. People deserve to know the truth and reporters should not be pressured (or bullied) to tell lies and glorify Novell. The reason some people never receive flak is because they never criticise anything of authority, not publicly anyway. Those who dare to challenge the propaganda model* are being constantly attacked and defamed [1, 2, 3].
One guarantee to being attacked is criticism of Mono (and by extension Moonlight). Most journalists either avoid confronting Mono or are simply parroting what Novell and Microsoft want people to say. Sam Varghese is the exception and as he pointed out a few days ago, the latest developments around Moonlight show that it is still a Novell-only piece of software. Even the Microsoft-faithful Tim Anderson is saying it very clearly right now (he wrote about it a day after Sam had done so):
Moonlight 2 released; no Microsoft codecs unless you get it from Novell
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It seems an odd restriction, and means that most users should download from Novell.
With the latest Mono release it remains clear that Microsoft builds fences around GNU/Linux developers. Ryan Paul carries on promoting the thing, which is rather unfortunate. It deceives people and this is not responsible. █
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* One good example of the propaganda model is Gates Foundation PR, with payments that go to bloggers, journalists and books, which do the PR [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and also bully those who dare to criticise the activities of the Gates Foundation. People are also being ridiculed and thus discouraged if they dare to say the truth about Vista 7. Microsoft’s PR agencies are spying on critics and responding to them.
