01.16.11
Novell Promotes Proprietary Software, Including Microsoft’s Fog Computing and Apple’s hypePhone Prison
Summary: Novell keeps looking for love in all the wrong places, essentially by empowering those who attack Linux the most (e.g. with patent lawsuits)
FURTHER to the previous post about Novell’s proprietary software nature (see NetWare material and other legacy), here are some examples where Microsoft’s ally Novell advances the opposite of Free software and GNU/Linux, not just by giving more software patents to Apple and Microsoft. There are surely some cases where Novell cannot be held accountable (Novell Address Book Converter for example), but where Novell actively promotes proprietary software (Novell Privileged User Manager 2.3 for example) the company should be shown for what it really is. It is regrettable that many people still think of Novell and occasionally describe it as an “open source” company.
Recently, Novell has been fascinated with Fog Computing and here one can find Novell commenting on Fog Computing. Novell is preaching or at least talking about Fog Computing in all sorts of articles and also this new video (one among many). Is this a characteristic of an “open source” company?
Last month we wrote about Novell's preference of hypePhone over Android (hypePhone-only application for proprietary software has come from Novell). Right about now there is further discussion about this [1, 2], which helps show the absurdity of it [1, 2, 3]. Novell puts Apple before Linux, as we covered before. Nobody should be shocked.
Novell generally offers support to other companies’ “open source” clouds and increasingly it uses the buzz phrase “private clouds” — a term that’s intended to dodge the bad reputation so-called ‘clouds’ are gradually gaining. Here is an example of a recent article which covers Novell’s Cloud Manager:
We tested five private cloud management products — Novell’s Cloud Manager, Eucalyptus Enterprise, OpenNebula, Citrix Lab Manager, and Cloud.com’s CloudStack — to see if the current generation of tools is up to the task. We found that Novell’s Cloud Manager was the only product that had all of the features we were looking for. Therefore, Cloud Manager is our Clear Choice Test winner. We were frustrated by some of the other products, and a couple are not yet ready for prime time.
What’s a lot more distributing, however, is Novell’s support for Microsoft’s AZune [sic] cloud. Why does Novell brag about it to make so many headlines, e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]?
As a side note, Novell hired a heckler who dislikes the FSF [1, 2] and it is paying him to promote Fog Computing:
A few weeks after winning a top prize in our first annual Dister awards contest for excellence in the development of software appliances, Radical Breeze leader Bryan Lunduke talked about Linux, appliances and SUSE Studio on the Novell-sponsored Internet radio show Cloudchasers.
When Novell talks about “cloud” it talks about proprietary software, unlike Red Hat for example. Red Hat will never promote AZune, but Novell — being a Microsoft partner — finds that natural. █
