“The hardest thing about replacing Windows 7 with Linux is getting the damn sticker off,” Tim from OpenBytes wrote (credit: OpenBytes)
Summary: Progress is made in the fight against predatory and clearly discriminatory bundling
Tim from OpenBytes has attempted to get a Vista 7 refund in the UK [1, 2] and on numerous occasions he has told the story of Microsoft tax, which comes in many forms. In the next episode of TechBytes we are going to cover the issue of patent tax Microsoft imposes on competition such as Android.
A Class-Action Lawsuit In the Making: No Windows 7 Refund
I recently purchased a Toshiba Satellite L675 laptop from Best Buy with the explicit intention of installing the 64-bit Fedora 14 GNU/Linux operating system on it. I talked to the resident “Geek Squad” guy and told him that I had absolutely no intention or desire to EVER run Windows 7 on the laptop. So my question is this: why should I have to pay for a piece of software that I have no intention of ever using? I told the “Geek” that I intended to install Fedora 14 on the laptop, and that I wanted a refund for the pre-installed Windows 7. He informed me that it was Best Buy’s policy that they would not and could not issue a refund. I purchased the laptop, got it home, and refused to accept the Windows 7 licensing agreement. I wiped Windows from the hard drive and proceeded to install Fedora. The laptop came with Windows 7 Home Premium.
After I had put the above story in Identi.ca Mr. Alexandre Oliva told me that UFA “just got a MS Windows reimbursement in .br (in pt_BR)” (this is a very important precedence). Other countries should follow suit. █
A “very unfortunate coincidence” when updating virus signatures and scanner software caused the free ClamWin (ClamAV for Windows) virus scanner to run amok and move large numbers of files into quarantine on Windows systems. On the ClamWin forum, various users reported that 25,000 files, including system files, were moved into quarantine as a result – more or less the entire system.
Microsoft on Tuesday revealed four vulnerabilities in the Mac version of its Office suite, but then failed to produce patches for the 2004 and 2008 editions.
Detailed analysis of the code in the Stuxnet worm has narrowed the list of suspects who could have created it.
The sophisticated malware is among the first to target the industrial equipment used in power plants and other large scale installations.
“Executives from security software developer Kaspersky told CDN that the level of sophistication in the Stuxnet super worm could challenge the competitivness of Canadian businesses,” adds this article (“Stuxnet will impact Canadian business competitiveness”) and more information about Stuxnet can be found in the posts below. █
Posted in Site News at 2:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Novell’s emphasis on “Cloud Computing” (a better name would be Fog Computing) is noted now that assets in the form of staff and copyrights are being passed to AttachMSFT [sic]
The only thing worse than proprietary software is proprietary software behind a so-called ‘cloud’ (Fog Computing). The user gets access to neither the code nor the binaries, as Dr. Stallman pointed out quite eloquently earlier in the year. For quite some time it has been acknowledged that Novell moved further away from free/open source software. We see it in the latest new products which also include Log Manager. Over in YouTube, new videos are promoting this section of Novell’s proprietary software [1, 2], even in foreign-as-in-non-English languages (many videos uploaded by NovellItalia, e.g. this one in Italian).
What is important to point out is that in Fog Computing too Novell does almost everything the proprietary way. Not only does Novell help companies take away control from users but it also takes away control from these companies. The users are therefore becoming hostages of both Novell and the company which operates Novell servers, including servers running SUSE for instance. One example of Novell’s proprietary software in this area would be PlateSpin, which has this new video about it.
“Red Hat offers similar functionality which is free/open source software.”Watch Novell coming out with some new Fog Computing propaganda. There is a new so-called ‘survey’, but upon closer inspection it’s just more marketing. “The survey [is] sponsored by Novell,” says this page, but a lot of articles quote it as though it’s a reliable reference, e.g. [1, 2]. To quote just this one example: “But according to a recent survey from Novell, half of businesses still see the state of cloud computing security as a barrier to adoption, and 81 percent have compliance-related concerns over storing data in the cloud.”
Almost everywhere you look at Novell these days (even in Linux events) you find Fog Computing and it is done the proprietary way, even though Novell does not mention this. The company does not care about software freedom and neither will AttachMSFT. It’s just another trouble in the making. It would be wise to abandon Novell now. █
Just sent two tweets to Miguel de Icaza about this:
@migueldeicaza So does it mean you will be somehow now working for Microsoft
@migueldeicaza Sorry meant to add a question mark… And how about IP rights for Mono? What does it mean copyrights-wise? Not worried?
And here’s his answer:
@2green Dont know the answer to that.
Further down it rightly says:
Miguel was very quick indeed to try to spread FUD and capitalize on the uncertainty that Oracle brought to Java, e.g. see: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Oct-26.html [tirania.org] I wonder how is this going to impact his disposition. Let me guess, it’s still better than Java right?
Another person says:
He has clarified that “don’t know” now:
@migueldeicaza So apparently Mono is NOT part of the IP that is being sold by Attachmate to Microsoft?
@eric_sink I dont know, what I know is that the exact details of the transaction are under SEC regulations, so info is limited.
Posted in Novell at 2:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Setting the record straight on the nature of Novell’s business based on some very recent news
AN article that caught our eyes the other day labels Novell an “open source company”. Well, even Novell does not pretend to be an open source company, it calls itself a “mixed source” company. Watch the discussion where Matt Aslett corrects this:
With just under 1,600 combined customers and revenues that doubled in the last year, de Montcheuil claims that the combined company will be the fifth-largest open source company, following Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL), Sourcefire (NASDAQ: FIRE) and Ingres.
451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett said the company “may well be there or thereabouts; depends on how you cut the numbers.”
“You have to decide where to draw the line on ‘pure play,’” Aslett told eCRM Guide. “For example, we would not count Novell. Although they do break out figures for the Linux business, if you include that you could also include a company like Actuate [$18 million in BIRT-related business last year] and then you might as well include IBM or Oracle.
The truth of the matter is, almost everything which Novell does these days is proprietary. We wrote many posts to illustrate this. Novell’s PR people are still clinging onto corruptible yardsticks like the so-called ‘Magic Quadrant’ which the Gartner Group uses to make companies pay for Gartner contracts, according to numerous allegations. Needless to say, it’s usually proprietary software whose owner pays Gartner that makes it into the Magic Quadrant. Gartner was even sued for it. Anyway, looking at the remainder of the Novell headlines, Novell’s BSM (business service management) product has an announcement to make just before the sale of the company (rushed disclosure of products before AttachMSFT [sic] comes).
To address market demand for strong authentication support for Identity and Access Management solutions, Authasas® now offers full support for strong authentication to Novell® SecureLogin.
Novell gets mentioned among other companies in all sorts of lists including this one:
As this step becomes more complex, a commercial enterprise access governance tool — such as Aveksa Inc.’s Access Certification, Oracle Corp.’s Oracle Identity Analytics, Novell Inc.’s Access Governance Suite, etc. — is needed to perform this activity.
There is also this report from New Zealand about a school that looks for change, including the possibility or replacing Novell’s proprietary stack (now is a likely time for it to happen).
The Ministry has contracts in place with Renaissance, Novell and Datacom for software licensing and support for Apple, Novell, Symantec and Microsoft technology, and with Telecom, Watchdog and Websense for web filtering and firewalls.
Back in 2005-2006 Novell had a lot of SUSE news to share. Now it’s just a proprietary company, so passing of this company to AttachMSFT is not a major loss. The free/libre (or open source) community will do fine without Novell. █
Posted in Deception, Novell at 1:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How sponsoring an event allows any company to give the impression that it is the leader in some domain
A LITTLE item we spotted the other day helps us illustrate a common phenomenon where a company helps organise an event where the company itself runs the show while it’s presented to the public as “independent”. One recent example of this comes from the Gates Foundation, which organises events for itself to spread propaganda from. TEDxChange is a recent incident [1, 2, 3, 4].
It is usually the same story in all conferences (just watch what Microsoft did to LinuxTag 2010 [1, 2, 3] and to the OpenOffice.org Conference) and the following excepts from a press release hopefully show who runs a show that’s said to be organised by UBM TechWeb (media company):
In addition to an extensive customer line-up, Enterprise 2.0 Conference recently confirmed Colleen O’Keefe, General Manager and Senior VP of Collaboration Solutions and Global Services, Novell, as a keynote speaker to join fellow thought leaders and industry executives on the keynote stage during the event.
[...]
Event sponsors include IBM, Jive, Novell, Moxie Software, Adobe, Broadvision, Microsoft, Rackspace Hosting, Spigit, SuccessFactors, Workday, BlueKiwi, and Saba.
Are they sponsoring for a keynote? What about the other companies? Do they too get their money’s worth? “My talk for cloudconf got refused because Microsoft gets to approve every speaker and they don’t like us,” said a person very recently. Some time earlier we learned that “Microsoft refused to sponsor the conference unless the conference organizers denied Zimbra the opportunity to take a big, prominent booth at the event.” █
“A stacked panel, on the other hand, is like a stacked deck: it is packed with people who, on the face of things, should be neutral, but who are in fact strong supporters of our technology. The key to stacking a panel is being able to choose the moderator. Most conference organizers allow the moderator to select die panel, so if you can pick the moderator, you win. Since you can’t expect representatives of our competitors to speak on your behalf, you have to get the moderator to agree to having only “independent ISVs” on the panel. No one from Microsoft or any other formal backer of the competing technologies would be allowed -just ISVs who have to use this stuff in the “real world.” Sounds marvellously independent doesn’t it? In feet, it allows us to stack the panel with ISVs that back our cause. Thus, the “independent” panel ends up telling the audience that our technology beats the others hands down. Get the press to cover this panel, and you’ve got a major win on your hands.”
Summary: OpenSUSE responds to the news of being passed to AttachMSFT [sic] and other news reveals bleak outlook for Novell’s Q4 results (weeks away)
WE are still trying to finish a special series of posts which looks at the effects of Novell being bought. The OpenSUSE community, led by Pascal Bleser in this case, has a message to pass (via blog and E-mail) about AttachMSFT's effect on OpenSUSE:
If you didn’t hear yet, Novell has agreed to be acquired by Attachmate Corporation. What does that mean for the openSUSE Project? We don’t know exactly yet because our crystal ball is currently in the shop and therefore fortune-telling is not our greatest talent However, we have other talents: we are a software developer community and we’re here to work on one of the greatest GNU/Linux distributions and other world class software distribution tools to advance Free and Open Source software together with the global FOSS community!
For now, we don’t know much about Attachmate, we have had no dealings with them yet and, as Novell is a publicly traded company, all of this is as new to us as to anyone else. But the openSUSE Project has had, since its beginning, a very vibrant cooperation with Novell, especially with Novell’s SUSE business, and we are looking forward to continuing this once Novell and SUSE become part of Attachmate! Our best wishes go out to the people of our community that are employed by Novell and SUSE, may this bring nothing but good things for you and your careers.
Many pundits have begun writing about this too, for example:
The last story says: “As this post indicates, Microsoft is acquiring technology assets aka Intellectual Properties developed by Novell, the leading Open Source vendor. Novell will sell its ‘so-called’ Intellectual Properties to Microsoft-owned CPTN Holdings LLC for mere $450 million in cash. [...] Another damage that Novell did to the Linux community though the agreement was in-directly admit that Linux violated Microsoft patents and that Novell would offer its customers needed patent-enforcement protection through this deal. Microsoft has till date not been able to name the patents that Linux violates. Linus Torvalds once told me in an interview that Microsoft is mudding the water.”
Yes, it is important to acknowledge Novell’s damage. We wrote about this for 4 years.
Where it leaves us now is the junction where Novell gets sold and we will cover that another day. Sadly, Novell’s poor state would be helpful to Microsoft and existing deployments will have excuses to move away from Novell. This new press release, for example, talks about Novell servers but doesn’t say if it’s SUSE or not. It doesn’t matter so far as uncertainty goes; to many companies, Novell products will be something to avoid due to perceived risk. The press release says: “The heart of the laboratory is a 299-gigabyte database of environmental and agricultural project records running on six HP servers and two Novell servers storing the data and running the modeling software.”
We are now seeing the end of Novell and many people are in denial. A former CIO for Novell (back when it was bigger) is now becoming a CTO in another company while Novell’s existing managers continue to flee. That’s not a good sign, is it?
Infogroup Appoints Gordon Jones As Chief Technology Officer
[...]
He has also worked as CIO for Novell (1990 – 1995), Franklin Templeton (1995 – 1999), Beyond.com (1999 – 2000), ToysRUs.com (2000 – 2001), eBay and formerly Wells Fargo subsidiary, BillPoint (2001 – 2003).
In all likelihood, AttachMSFT [sic] will make promises that it won’t fulfill. As we said back in September, it’s “Goodbye Novell”.█
Posted in Novell at 6:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Novell Operations Center is released in the 90th minute, just before Novell enters a dark age
ANOTHER PRODUCT WHICH AttachMSFT is going to get from Novell is called Novell Operations Center and it is a new product. Novell uploaded a presentation about it a few times because the company also started pushing advertisements into YouTube in general, and not just for Novell Operations Center. Here is the press release about this product, which came out in a week with high density of Novell activities (probably in preparation for the big announcement). As Oiaohm puts it: “Product releases before the sale would be developers attempting to keep there jobs at least in a maintainership role.”
However, we have other talents: we are a software developer community and we’re here to work on one of the greatest GNU/Linux distributions and other world class software distribution tools to advance Free and Open Source software together with the global FOSS community!
