Summary: Novell is still primarily a company of black boxes, WorkloadIQ being the latest example of a trend

AS IF JUST to show its lack of commitment to software freedom, Novell continues to announce the release of more proprietary software and ITWeb is just reposting press releases like several other sites that serve as Novell's mouth:

Novell today announced WorkloadIQ (TM) -- the companys differentiated approach to lead and enable the rapidly growing intelligent workload management(IWM) market. Novells strategy for IWM, WorkloadIQ, is based on its ability to integrate identity and security into IT workloads thereby giving customers the confidence and flexibility needed to deliver IT services to end users across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Following its December 2009 announcement to compete in the IWM market, Novell has shipped seven WorkloadIQ products, to date, and plans to ship five additional products before the end of December 2010. Many customers and partners have committed to WorkloadIQ by investing in one or more of these products.

This is the type of thing Novell promotes in Linux events, as already noted in the previous post. There are other examples and even Novell training is going that way. Novell uses Fog Computing in order to sell proprietary software and encourage use of such software.

There is also Novell's Ballnux, which is a Microsoft distribution of GNU/Linux (Microsoft makes money from it) masquerading as Free software. IBM uses SLES and Novell promotes that product at the expense of OpenSUSE. Here is another article about Novell's Amazon deal, which helps put a Ballnux-modeled Microsoft tax on all servers there.

Novell today announced that Amazon Web Services (AWS) will offer hourly based pricing and support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

As an update from the Mono camp we have:

Gabriel Burt, one of Banshee’s maintainers, merged in the GIO/udev hardware backend that Alan McGovern and I have been working on. This is awesome for everyone. Here’s why it’s awesome for you.

Novell is also uploading loads of old commercials via the appropriately-named account, VintageNovell, which is described as follows (in the channel):

This is the Channel for old Novell Marketing videos. Most of the videos on this channel were filmed in the mid to late 90's.

About 20 more videos were uploaded in the past month (starting August 12^th), celebrating Novell's marketing legacy, which is purely for proprietary software. Here is an "outdated Novell server" causing problems this month. Why does anybody still buy from Novell? Is it the brand? ⬆