02.16.11
Class Action Lawsuit Against Novell/AttachMSFT and Other Faux Novell News
Summary: Collective backlash against Novell’s sale to AttachMSFT; news that does not directly relate to Novell is spun as Novell news
According to this announcement mirrored by a pro-Novell site, “Levi & Korsinsky, LLP has filed a class action lawsuit in the United States District Court for District of Massachusetts on behalf of current stockholders of Novell, Inc. in connection with the planned acquisition of the company by Attachmate Corporation and Longview Software Acquisition Corp.” This case of Levi and Korsinsky was mentioned here before. There are other lawsuits and little time remains before Novell signs the deal with AttachMSFT (spot the similarity to the Nokia deal [1, 2, 3, 4]).
Novell’s portfolio which it sells so cheaply is not open source and AttachMSFT will need to borrow money for it. This portfolio includes legacy software and unproven new software like Vibe (formerly "Pulse") which Novell’s PR people are trying desperately to market (Google has given up on it, in the form of Wave, the original work) and among other PR output there is this bit about SLE*, which is not entirely free/open either (unlike OpenSUSE, which is planning genuine virtual parties, not PR).
Every time you turnaround, someone is talking about “the cloud” and its power. Analyst firms are forecasting billions of dollars being spent on cloud computing and pundits are predicting the cloud will redefine the current standards for computing. But do most people really know what any of that means? More importantly, do they know specifically how to maximize the cloud for profit.
Novell is marketing SLE* using the Fog Computing nonsense, which is essentially marketing of another form of lock-in and loss of control over one’s software, as well as one’s data (very risky given Novell’s new security flaws). See this new article about the London Stock Exchange (LSE) because SJVN, a longtime proponent of Novell, is washing that as though it’s about Novell and not about GNU/Linux with some other software on top of it. Why does he take the promotional Novell angle? That’s like saying that the world’s top computers run Novell rather than just give credit to “IBM”, “SUSE” (bought by Novell with IBM’s aid), or maybe “GNU/Linux”. █
