05.26.10

What Novell Still Does: Software Patents and .NET

Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Mono, Novell at 4:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Ron Hovsepian begs Ballmer

Summary: Supine, weak, miserable Novell is doing the only things it still knows how to do, namely assisting Microsoft and amassing controversial patents on computer algorithms

FIVE more software patents have just been granted to Novell, which loves software patents very much (it’s always just software patents from Novell because Novell is not a hardware company). Microsoft too loves software patents because 85% of Microsoft's patent applications are said to be software patents.

Here is a list of Novell’s latest patents:

Method for rule locating, ordering and combining in a polyhierarichical environment , patent No. 7,725,416, invented by Duane Buss of West Mountain, assigned to Novell Inc. of Provo.

Recurrent billing maintenance with radio-frequency payment devices , patent No. 7,725,427, invented by Fred Bishop of Glendale, Ariz., and Peter D. Saunders of Salt Lake City.

System and method for restoring a database in a distributed database system , patent No. 7,725,428, invented by Brian Hawkins of Santaquin, Andrew Hodgkinson of Pleasant Grove, Daniel Sanders of Orem and Steven S. McLain of Provo, assigned to Novell Inc. of Provo.

Defragmentation in a virtual environment , patent No. 7,725,506, invented by Russell R. Stringham of Orem, assigned to Symantec Corp. of Mountain View, Calif.

System and method for providing advanced reservations in a compute environment , patent No. 7,725,583, invented by David B. Jackson of Spanish Fork, assigned to Adaptive Computing Enterprises Inc. of Provo.

System and method of imaging a memory module while in functional operation , patent No. 7,725,670, invented by Matthew A. Misbach of Orem, assigned to Novell Inc. of Provo.

Generic template to autogenerate reports for software target testing , patent No. 7,725,772, invented by Philip J. Proto of Groveland, Mass., assigned to Novell Inc. of Provo.

Audio-related system node instantiation , patent No. 7,725,826, invented by Richard Allen Kreifeldt of South Jordan, John Lee of Salt Lake City, William A. Plunkett of Granger, Ind., Timothy J. Shuttleworth of Woodland Hills, Calif., Andrew Stevenson of Hemel Hempstead, U.K. and Bruce Vander Werf of Elkhart, Ind., assigned to Harman International Industries Inc. of Northridge, Calif.

System and method for using sandboxes in a managed shell , patent No. 7,725,922, invented by Sebastien Pouliot of Beauport, Calif., assigned to Novell Inc. of Provo.

Mono and Moonlight are known to be patent problems, but why would Novell mind? It has patent ‘peace’ with Microsoft, unlike those other distributors of GNU/Linux. Novell is marketing itself based on this whole exclusive "peace of mind" thing.

Looking a few days back, Adrian Bridgwater from ZDNet was escorted by Microsoft and Novell to promote their relationship while IDG and The Register promote this Novell/Microsoft .NET assault on the Linux-based Android [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13]. The Street has a copy of one article

Novell, for its part, is announcing MonoDroid, a software development kit for building Android applications using code and libraries written for the Microsoft .Net development framework and languages like C#. MonoDroid functions with the Android SDK.

If this is how Novell ‘contributes’ to GNU/Linux, then it's better off sold away. █

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