12.19.09
Meet Canonical’s New CEO
Summary: A chat with Jane Silber (Linux.com, 2008)
This will hopefully keep quiet the “Ubuntu is sexist” crowd.
European Commission Unable to Defend Free Software from Microsoft Patent Racket
“Microsoft is asking people to pay them for patents, but they won’t say which ones. If a guy walks into a shop and says: “It’s an unsafe neighbourhood, why don’t you pay me 20 bucks and I’ll make sure you’re okay,” that’s illegal. It’s racketeering.”
–Mark Shuttleworth
Summary: The European Commission is either unwilling or unable to understand how Microsoft uses software patents against Free software, even in Europe where such patents are illegal
ACCORDING to Charlie McCreevy's (shown above) vision of Europe, one unified patent law might soon become a reality that incorporates software patents. The European Commission is being either totally bamboozled or simply lobbied to death. It’s already manned by the wrong people. André Rebentisch has this little update about McCreevy’s folly (he is no longer one among candidate Commission heads whom André is watching):
Issue 56 features the outgoing Commissioner Charlie McCreevy. McCreevy’s pet project financial market deregulation was cratered last year together with the Irish model and won’t come back in the new portfolio. He assumes an ideological mission to defend the single market for his successor:
The job of the next Commission, I believe would be to stand against those who, for a variety of political reasons, some of them may be ideological or philosophical, whatever they’d be, block the Single Market. To not allow the Single Market, the European markets to be interfered with.
Indeed, there are such forces, for instance those who prefer protection of geographical indications or the member states patent offices which obstruct the creation of a community patent for the single market.
Microsoft front group ACT is lobbying for this as it enables Microsoft to bypass the law. It is more or less the same with EIF, which we mentioned in:
- European Interoperability Framework (EIF) Corrupted by Microsoft et al, Its Lobbyists
- Orwellian EIF, Fake Open Source, and Security Implications
- No Sense of Shame Left at Microsoft
- Lobbying Leads to Protest — the FFII and the FSFE Rise in Opposition to Subverted EIF
- IBM and Open Forum Europe Address European Interoperability Framework (EIF) Fiasco
- EIF Scrutinised, ODF Evolves, and Microsoft’s OOXML “Lies” Lead to Backlash from Danish Standards Committee
- Complaints About Perverted EIF Continue to Pile Up
- More Complaints About EIFv2 Abuse and Free Software FUD from General Electric (GE)
Microsoft is meanwhile patenting everything under the sun. Yesterday in Slashdot there was another new example:
“A newly disclosed Microsoft patent application — Avatar Individualized by Physical Characteristic — takes aim at fat people, proposing to generate fat avatars in gaming environments for individuals whose health records indicate they’re overweight, limiting their game play, and even banning them. From the patent application: ‘An undesirable body weight could be reflected in an overweight or underweight appearance for the avatar. Only requisite health levels are allowed to compete in a certain competition level. A dedicated gamer could exercise for a period of time until his health indicator gadget shows a sufficiently high health/health credit in order to allow reentering the avatar environment.’ Linking one’s gaming avatar to one’s physique, explains Microsoft, will produce healthy and virtuous behaviors in individuals. Microsoft also proposes shaping gaming experiences by using ‘psychological and demographic information such as education level, geographic location, age, sex, intelligence quotient, socioeconomic class, occupation, marital/relationship status, religious belief, political affiliation, etc.’”
We have already shown that using a new deal with the EU Commission Microsoft is trying to ban commercial use of Free software. The ‘Microsoft press’ is working to distract or to hide it, but Simon Phipps, whom we mentioned in the previous post, writes the following words about the Microsoft-sponsored blogger who was speaking to Brad Smith for the Microsoft spin: “Well worth reading to understand Microsoft’s world-view. Sadly Smith wasn’t asked about the “patent promise” I mention below, but this interview helps us understand why Microsoft believed IE was important (developer APIs) and why they love “interoperability” (because it was the keyword for release from 12 years of investigation).”
“[T]he Microsoft “patent promise” is roughly useless for open source communities as it only gives protection for non-commercial uses…”
–Simon PhippsIn reference to the FSFE’s complaint, Phipps writes: “The long war is finally over, without really correcting any of the injustices but with a few small concessions from a Microsoft that wants us to think it is contrite and changed. But the FSFE is right – the Microsoft “patent promise” is roughly useless for open source communities as it only gives protection for non-commercial uses; the very essence of open source is the alignment of fragments of (usually commercial) interest by many community participants. This should be the first thing Microsoft’s new head of open source addresses on appointment, but to do it will be tough since it will take air-cover at the highest levels to address.”
It’s not about the browser ballot screen (which is no justice, either), it’s about Free software. Some reporters like Paula Rooney wrongly describe the Web browser case as though it is related to Free software, even though Opera (case originator) is proprietary. In fact, too few publications wrote about the stunt Microsoft has just pulled on the “interoperability” front. █
Simon Phipps: “Linux is No Longer Important Enough to Justify a Business Unit at Novell”
Summary: A look at Novell’s de-emphasis on GNU/Linux and increased focus on Microsoft software
AFTER YET another rough week for Novell, the big news about big departures is being ignored by the Var Guy as well Zacks (also here). They both focus on Novell’s decoy, which goes under the “reorg” banner. This deficiency in reporting is probably not deliberate, but it could be the act of self-censorship due to bias or the cattle effect (other reporters were fooled as well).
Some time in the middle of 2009 a Xandros manager said: “We are kind of getting away from being a Linux company.”
“Novell is pushing (with press releases and funding) Microsoft imitations of original software like Flash and Java.”We last mentioned this when we showed that all vendors that had signed a patent deal with Microsoft sooner or later faded. Xandros has been getting into Microsoft's ecosystem ever since the deal was signed and so has Novell, which is no longer promoting web standards and GPL-licensed frameworks like Java. Instead, Novell is pushing (with press releases and funding) Microsoft imitations of original software like Flash and Java. Microsoft is manipulating Novell and Free software, playing these two groups off against each other (ever since they manufactured a way to attack the GPLv2, using software patents).
In a quick post about public statements, the head of free and Open Source strategy and licensing at Sun Microsystems interprets Novell’s so-called “reorg” as: “linux is no longer important enough to justify a business unit at Novell.”
The matter of fact is that OpenSUSE is left with unpaid “boosters” [1, 2, 3] that Novell seems to care too little about (Novell fires SUSE developers while promoting Mono and Silverlight for Microsoft [1, 2, 3]). Sascha Manns writes:
The [OpenSUSE] Boosters Team tried to make the Webpresence easyer. So they would like to give more Information in shorter Time.
Novell’s CMO wrote about branding a few days ago. From his blog post:
Heck, what CMO wouldn’t want one of the worlds most famous athletes speaking on behalf of their brand. Yet while the emotional side of me loves the idea, the practical side says our brand is far too important to entrust to someone else.
Novell lets lizards do the marketing for a major product. It might seem awkward, but the mascot was inherited from S.u.S.E. Another mascot Novell seems to be putting its presence behind is actually a monkey that it inherited from Ximian. It represents Microsoft’s presence in GNU/Linux. It’s easy to see why.
Banshee, a Novell project that only Novell customers are permitted to use safely, has had some notable changes amid its inclusion in OpenSUSE alongside the latest Mono. Another employee of Novell sheds light on how close Mono, .NET, CodePlex, and Ms-PL are becoming. Groklaw called it “fusion” with Microsoft (Novell embracing Microsoft, not the other way around).
NerdDinner is an ASP.NET MVC sample, licensed under the Ms-PL with sources hosted at CodePlex.
Is this the future of GNU/Linux as full-time Novell staff ought to see it? Its vice president Miguel de Icaza is already a board member of Microsoft's CodePlex Foundation. It’s one step away from working directly for Steve Ballmer and there seems to be a vacancy for those who are particularly enthusiastic about anything Microsoft does (even it it's bad). █
Updates on Microsoft-funded SCO Attack on Novell, Novell’s EU Case and Settlement
“[Microsoft's] Mr. Emerson and I discussed a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would ‘backstop,’ or guarantee in some way, BayStar’s investment…. Microsoft assured me that it would in some way guarantee BayStar’s investment in SCO.”
–Larry Goldfarb, Baystar, key investor in SCO
Summary: How Novell is being legally screwed by Microsoft, as suggested by this week’s news
THE following articles are hopefully detailed enough to shed light without further commentary.
• [SCO's] Ch. 11 Trustee Cahn Opposes SUSE’s Motion to Lift Stay
Edward Cahn, SCO’s appointed Chapter 11 Trustee, now making decisions for SCO, has filed an opposition to SUSE’s request to lift the bankruptcy stay so the arbitration can go forward. And Al Petrofsky has filed a motion pro se demanding that SCO file its missing MORs.
The Cahn objection to SUSE’s request can be summed up simply. SCO has limited funds, and Cahn doesn’t want to spend them on the arbitration. The trial in Utah is set for March, and if SCO loses and the jury decides it doesn’t own the copyrights, then there will be no need for the arbitration to go forward. If, on the other hand, it wins, then it can proceed with the arbitration issues because, as footnote 5 puts it, “resources may become available to the Debtors if they prevail at trial”. SCO has to pay the lawyers for the Swiss arbitration. That is not covered by the agreement with Boies Schiller, and the lawyers in Europe are on top of that. Then they’d have to hire experts. Cahn tells the court that it should defer to his judgment on how to proceed in the various litigations.
• Answering SCO [Lies] Bit by Bit – The Robert Swartz Memo, Take 2
So, where is the big payday going to come from? No. Really. What SCO’s new management needs to ask is this: are we being given good legal advice in this instance?
• Answering SCO [Lies] Bit by Bit: a.out.h, errno.h and the GPL
I find include/linux/a.out.h and include/asm-i386/errno.h as well as the name of a Caldera employee, Torsten Duwe, and the GPL referenced, as well as the credit to Caldera Systems and a mention of calderalabs.com. The CD is copyrighted 2000, and printed on the CD it says that source code for OpenLinux eServer 2.3 was available at www.calderasystems.com/eServer. It’s available on the CD as well, happily, since SCO has removed the page listed on the CD, as they have so much that Groklaw published that shows they have been serving up an order of baloney.
So I opened it up from the CD in emacs, linux-kernel-include-2.2.14-1S.i386.rpm, and there’s the very a.out.h and errno.h files listed as verboten, as big as life, in Caldera’s very own product…
• Blank Rome Adds a Lawyer, Regina Stango Kelbon
• The Microsoft Saga Comes to an End (Novell’s role also mentioned here)
Among others, the objections came from companies like Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) and Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL). The major grievance was the companies’ bundling of software packages alongside Microsoft Windows.
Is it not ironic that Novell and Microsoft are now allies? Microsoft led its opposition to virtually deserting a key case over systematic abuses. █
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Novell News Summary – Part III: SAP and Novell Kiss Again, Groupwise Shamed in Public by Google
Summary: A mixed bag of news regarding key Novell products that are proprietary
IT HAS BEEN a very bad week for Novell, but a company/firm called Skymark Research intends to look into the company’s financial situation.
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Novell News Summary – Part II: SLES in IBM Mainframes and HP, Other Ballnux Distributions (Bada)
Summary: News about Free software that Microsoft is “taxing” using unnamed software patents (Ballnux distributions) with the consent/cooperation of the distributors
ANOTHER week goes by and later on we will show that Novell is losing its “Linux” focus. Among the news we can find SUSE mentioned, but not as much as it used to. Here in The Register there is news about Red Hat abandoning Itanium (it’s about time). Tim uses this as an opportunity to describe what he sees as an opportunity for SUSE.
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Novell News Summary – Part I: OpenSUSE Gets the KDE Vote, OpenDesktop.org-Build Service Integration
Summary: OpenSUSE is seen as the most mature KDE-based distribution (by Tux Radar’s tests), OpenDesktop.org and OpenSUSE Build Service (OBS) meet to reach a commendable milestone, and more news from the past week
NOVELL had to cope with some bad news this week and for OpenSUSE it has been a quiet week, probably as many people go on vacation or engage in more fashionable consumerism. What we were able to find about OpenSUSE is separated as follows:
Reviews
SJVN has reviewed a variety of candidates for “best” GNU/Linux distribution. Being a SUSE fan, he also included OpenSUSE in his comparison that he published with IDG.
At first glance, there’s little to differentiate between the latest releases of the top Linux distributions: Red Hat’s Fedora 12, Novell’s openSUSE 11.2 and Canonical’s Ubuntu 9.10. They each use the latest releases of open-source applications and are based on recent Linux kernels. Each of the distros also includes open-source applications such as OpenOffice and Firefox. However, a closer look reveals real differences — in fact, each is meant for a different audience.
Underneath the hood, each of the three uses the 2.6.31 Linux kernel, but above that, their differences begin to surface. Fedora and Ubuntu, for example, use GNOME 2.28 (the latest version) for their default desktop, while openSUSE uses KDE 4.3.1.
[...]
If you’re a Linux expert, Fedora is for you. If you just want a good, general-purpose desktop for home or work, then openSUSE is your best pick. And if you’re new to Linux, and your computer gets along well with Ubuntu, Ubuntu is still a good choice.
Interestingly enough, some people in the OpenSUSE community insist on making a KDE3-based OpenSUSE. Maybe SUSE Studio will enable them to do this, but speaking for myself, I could not possibly go back to KDE3. KDE4 is a lot better in almost every way. But it’s all about choice at the end.
Tux Radar has just surveyed KDE-based distributions. The winner? OpenSUSE. It seems to make sense.
Rather than providing simple packages for KDE, a real KDE distro is likely to include GUI refinements, usability tweaks, custom themes, artwork and a good selection of KDE applications. It’s also nice when Gnome and GTK applications play happily with their KDE counterparts, especially if a compatible theme has been chosen from them both. KDE-based distros should be able to do this better than simple Gnome desktops.
So, we took eight of the top KDE-focused distros and pitched them head-to-head to find which ones really rock, and which ones just limp along with a vanilla set of packages. Read on!
[...]
Our choice: OpenSUSE
As we mentioned at the beginning of this Roundup, the reason why there’s no single-page review of a single distribution is because they’re all just so close. KDE is pretty much KDE whichever distribution you choose, and most users will make the desktop their own within weeks anyway. You could install any of the distributions we’ve looked at and get productive with your usual array of applications within an hour.
OpenSUSE has also just won this new convert, so all in all, there must be a sense of achievement there.
In the last week of November I installed OpenSuse 11.2 on an Acer Asprire1 654ZWLMi. The installation steps went smoothly. However, when the time for the first boot came, where the installation’s configuration takes place, the X server failed to start. The cause was the ATI graphics card. I quickly found others with this problem in the OpenSuse forum, in this thread: OpenSuse 11.2 Black Screen. A combination of the suggestions on the thread solved the problem for me. The XServer was “hot-wired” to work with the ATI card and driver: “sax2 -r -m 0=ati”. The installation continued from were it left over, without any other shortcomings.
It seems that OpenSuse 11.2 installs quite well on a variety of configurations.
OpenSuse also performs very well for my needs. It offers good administration tools (zypper, YAST) and quality technical information on the wiki and the forums. Still though I consider technical articles in the Gentto wikis and forums superior.
Technical
Novell/OpenSUSE made no announcements about technical breakthroughs, except the following perhaps (not a press release):
The openSUSE Build Service got a boost today from openDesktop.org. The openDesktop.org network now has a feature that allows contributors to link to packages in the openSUSE Build Service directly from KDE-Apps.org and GNOME-Apps.org. This makes it easier for users to get software that’s packaged for their Linux distro.
This has also been mentioned a couple of times by Zonker [1, 2] and there are other enhancements of interest in OpenSUSE Build Service (OBS).
In terms of technical documentation, there was little which can be described as OpenSUSE specific. Here is something about Cronie and about WebYaST 1.0. The cloning of VMs is demonstrated with OpenSUSE right here and installation of Flash likewise. Masim Sugianto wrote about installation Zimbra on top of OpenSUSE (he did this before, but with previous versions) and how issues were resolved.
OpenSUSE gets some more new packages [1, 2, 3], but these are not terribly important (obscure software or a beta). Sascha is typically writing a lot about them and he has also released this week’s news for OpenSUSE. Maybe it’s the last one until after the holidays. █
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Moonlight and Hyper-V Still Novell-Only and SUSE-Only in Some Ways
Summary: Microsoft projects are still upselling a distribution from which Microsoft extracts money for imaginary software patents
THE LATEST bit of news about Moonlight was expected to have untold information which is crucial. This very self-explanatory picture reminds us that Moonlight is essentially a Microsoft project and Microsoft is not allowed to help its #1 competitor, by definition (unless it somehow helps Microsoft in another way).
After a little bit of research it turned out that Novell customers are still in a privileged position when it comes to Moonlight. Sam Varghese writes:
There is one simple reason – the version of Moonlight that other distributions can offer will be able to play only media which are in free or open source formats.
To play any other format means one has to buy licences for proprietary media codecs from the owners.
Users who obtain Moonlight from Novell will have access to these codecs.
But you wouldn’t know about this if you read the Novell press release. (Microsoft hasn’t deemed this announcement, which apparently is another earth-shaking one for the Moonlight project head, Miguel de Icaza, important enough to issue a media release).
Here’s how Novell puts it: “The covenant is no longer limited to users that obtain Moonlight from Novell or its channel, but now covers users who obtain Moonlight from any third party, including other Linux distributors. Media Codecs for MP3 and VC1, and in the future H.264 and AAC, are supported through the Microsoft Media Pack, a Microsoft-delivered set of media codes that offer optimized and licensed decodecs to every Linux user who obtains Moonlight from Novell.”
For completeness, here is Novell’s announcement and a variety of articles about it:
- Novell finalizes Moonlight 2; offers broader distribution terms
- Moonlight, Microsoft Patent Covenant Updates
- Moonlight 2 hot on the heels of Silverlight
- Silverlight for Linux Evolves, Moonlight 2 Available for Download
- Open source Silverlight clone rev’d
Varghese has also attempted to find out what led to hostility towards GNU recently, after complaints about posts in Planet GNOME [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. He writes:
A member of the GNOME Foundation board has denied that a post by GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza led to a discussion on the Foundation mailing list which resulted in a call for the project to cut its ties with the GNU Project.
Behdad Esfahbod made reference to a story in these columns, wherein it was claimed that a Planet GNOME post by De Icaza, about Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, served as the catalyst for another Foundation member, Lucas Rocha, to start a discussion on members’ complaints about the type of content appearing on the Planet.
It is commonly argued that posts endorsing VMware were the cause for this whole incident. VMware is not much of a friend and we wrote about it in:
- No Point to Microsoft’s New Datacentres, Microsoft-dominated VMware Comes to Redmond’s Back Garden
- VMware Turns Sour After Microsoft Intervention
- What is Going on at VMware?
Speaking of which, watch how Microsoft still discriminates against GNU/Linux distributions that don’t pay Microsoft.
9 Reasons Enterprises Shouldn’t Switch To Hyper-V
[...]
1. Breadth of OS support
Before we get into the nitty gritty, let’s start with the most basic of features and simplest of tasks. Say you are an IT shop that supports more than just Windows servers; you have a mixed environment with different flavors of Linux and Unix. Hyper-V, however, supports only Windows and SuSE Linux. That’s it. If I am to recommend an enterprise virtualization infrastructure, it would need to support a bit more than one flavor of Linux.
After Xen was brought closer to Microsoft, its partner of the year Citrix is helping Hyper-V using Xen, as expected. From The Register:
You heard that right. Citrix is getting its virtual machine failover technology to Microsoft’s Hyper-V and integrating it with Systems Center management tools ahead of its own XenServer/Essentials combo.
Microsoft is just trying to distort this entire market. Almost all the large virtualisation companies (except Qumranet/KVM, which Red Hat bought, as well as Virtual Iron, which oracle bought to bury) are there to serve Microsoft/Windows in some way. Novell is the same and it is going downhill. Tom Harvey has just written about the two executives who flee Novell and he adds this factoid:
Williams is trimming his estimates of Novell revenues for the first quarter of the new fiscal year by 3 percent and for next year by 1 percent compared to this year, with earnings per share for the year at 31 cents, down 9.6 percent over the current year.
“The biggest risk that we see for Novell in the year ahead is that management will lose credibility with the Street and the stock will be dead money until proof of concept becomes visible to investors,” the report said.
As we wrote earlier in the week, the ridiculously high bonuses that Ron Hovsepian receives may indicate that he would otherwise leave the company, leading to a huge loss of credibility. █
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