Novell has lost over 5% of its value over the past month, which puts it at almost a quarter the value of Red Hat, even though it depends on what's measured and when.

More financial news about Novell can be found in [1, 2, 3]. It keeps changing and it changed a lot throughout the week.

“Novell's PR is banging on the Vista 7 drum again. Still looking for love in all the wrong places?”To Novell, there's somewhat of a "death spiral" thing going on. Customers realise that Novell is up for sale and with uncertainty in mind they move over to Red Hat for the most part. Novell cannot quite recover from this, but one of its hypocrites says that CA buying Arcos is a case of "Filling a Hole with Too Little Too Late" (look who's talking).

Novell's CMO has been pondering a marketing strategy, having attempted some things in vain (Novell's marketing team is promoting Vista 7). Novell's PR is banging on the Vista 7 drum again. Still looking for love in all the wrong places? Novell's legacy/proprietary software keeps getting rusty and vulnerable [1, 2], so what's an aging software company to do?

There is Novell's proprietary Fog Computing, which IDG continues to promote [1, 2, 3] (Novell buys 'studies'/whitepapers and advertising from IDG). Sonia Arrison, with her history of attacking Free software, is back to ECT after a long time and this time she is promoting Fog Computing by daemonising Richard Stallman.

Here is some of Novell's proprietary side, based on a new press release:

idOnDemand, pioneers in smart identification, today announced a program aimed at making it free for new Novell SecureLogin customers to implement a standards based, highly secure, single identity for access to all enterprise resources, buildings and IT. Companies eligible to participate in the Free SmartID program are new Novell SecureLogin customers or existing customers who purchase additional licenses. They will receive a license for 50 free SmartIDs from idOnDemand when they purchase 500 SecureLogin seats from Novell or 100 free SmartIDs when they purchase 1,000 SecureLogin seats. This is up to a $5,550 value, and the program runs through December 31, 2010.

This is what Novell's business is about, it's not about GNU/Linux

Looking at the area of Novell that's actually Free software they have the valuable OSB. SUSE is sometimes used to connect to Fog Computing though.

OBS does not magically turn source files into packages. OBS cannot simply be fed a .tar.gz -- developers must still prepare their software in the .rpm and/or .deb format, but afterwards, they can sit back and watch as OBS handles the rest. It will create a repository to host the file, and at no cost to the developer.

In summary, a stronger Red Hat and weaker Novell would be just fine. A stronger Novell means more proprietary software (and Microsoft 'Linux tax'), whereas Red Hat uses financial resources to produce more Free software and resist Microsoft. It's really that simple. ⬆