Summary: As Novell potentially comes to the end of its last era, another synopsis is presented based on news about its products

ACCORDING to this original statement, Novell is still on the block. This possibly means that Novell as a publicly-traded company is having its last weeks/months.

One of Novell's first employees has published a book about the company's early history and a few weeks ago he made/uploaded the following video.



Here is another new video that mentions Novell in the context of GNU/Linux.

Proprietary

Novell is a predominantly proprietary software company, still. In fact, Novell seems to be drifting away in this direction, under the blanket of Fog Computing. There is a new Service Pack for BlackBerry Enterprise Server for Novell GroupWise (proprietary), some fixes for iPrint, and also these two new stories where DoxTek is bragging about Novell as a client and Novell brags about Uvex (Germany) as its client. A lot of revenue still comes from Novell's proprietary software portfolio (including software it sells on top of SUSE).

Mono

There is only little coverage about Mono and virtually nothing about Moonlight. Here is one post about Tomboy in Ubuntu and another Windows video about MonoDevelop and a program called 8ball. It's rather telling that Mono is not about GNU/Linux, not anymore anyway.

SLE*

We rarely hear about SLED users, but some who are using it post instructions (part 1 of 8 parts and not in English). A Virtual Desk Infrastructure (VDI) product supports SLED now:

Oracle, Amazon Offer New Ways to Run Linux From Afar

[...]

VDI 3.2 officially supports Ubuntu, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and Oracle Enterprise Linux, though organizations are free to run other Linux distributions with the software as well. Oracle has no plans to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux, given that the company's own Oracle Enterprise Linux is a close replica of that OS, Coekaerts said.

Speaking of Amazon, further to what we wrote earlier on about SLES at Amazon [1, 2], there's more news coverage such as:

● Novell Expands Cloud Computing Linux to Amazon

● Linux faithful like idea of easy SUSE AWS deployment

● Amazon To Sell Novell SUSE Linux On EC2

● Novell puts SuSE in the Amazon EC2 cloud

● Amazon, Novell to sell full SUSE Linux on EC2

● Oracle, Amazon Offer New Ways to Run Linux From Afar

● Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server now available on Amazon Web Services

OpenSUSE

OpenSUSE is intended to be the free/libre SLE*, but with the exception of some HOWTOs and occasional reviews or summaries, there is rarely any story told about large deployments of OpenSUSE. Red Hat and Canonical seem to have a stronger grip on desktops.

OpenSUSE still comprises volunteers like this person who writes: "Working on design for the openSUSE project is indeed a hard thing to do. I am not a Novell or openSUSE employee. I do what I do with my free time, which will be drastically reduced soon, because the school year is starting at the end of the month."

The project called "OpenSUSE" is still Novell's property. It would help if Novell truly set it free (as in independent).

SCO

Groklaw and Lamlaw continue to explore the SCO case since SCO appeals the ruling in Novell's favour [1, 2].

An issue is hardly moot when SCO continues to appeal the relevant issues. But, then SCO has to somehow get the US Supreme Court to stay away from their nuisance law suits. SCO lawyers know for certain that if the US Supreme Court decides that a writing means that the specific copyrights subject to a transfer actually have to be identified in the writing itself, they are out of luck.

Regardless of this case, there's still Oracle to worry about [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10], not to mention Microsoft and Apple, both of which are suing to get royalties out of Linux. Novell already pays such royalties to Microsoft, having approached Microsoft to make it happen. ⬆