04.07.11
Novell Turns Free/Libre Google Software Into Proprietary Software Products
Novell is a leech
Summary: How Novell uses other people’s work that they produce for free in order to sell proprietary software from Novell
IN OUR more recent posts about Vibe (e.g. [1, 2, 3]) we explained its relation to Google Wave and also to parts of Novell’s proprietary portfolio (e.g. Groupwise). It’s rather striking that no journalist dares to criticise Novell for the nature of what it’s doing, which is in some sense more cheeky than what SAP is doing to deliver something similar.
In its latest announcement Novell says just about nothing about who did a lot of the heavy lifting and instead there is marketing lingo which sells proprietary software. To quote one article: “Novell Vibe Cloud is an enterprise social media product that combines activity streams and ad hoc collaboration with file sharing and group editing capabilities. While the beta test is over, a Basic Edition product will remain available for free and essentially provides all the same collaborative capabilities on a single-user model, with a 250 megabyte limit on file storage. Upgrading to the Enterprise Edition ($84 per user per year) buys an organization more administrative control, integration with enterprise directory services, and unlimited collaboration groups.”
Other coverage is pretty much the same [1, 2, 3, 4]. It does not say where Novell received a lot of the code (and it contributes nothing back). As we are going to show later, Novell exploits Linux in more or less the same way. Novell uses SUSE to sell proprietary software which is made at Novell. It’s the same with Mono. Novell is like Apple in this regard. █
