Summary: Roundup of news about Novell’s strategic and practical focus, as well as the beneficiaries
ANY pattern, especially with persistent repetition, can be easy to pinpoint. Most Mono and Moonlight promoters do not like GNU/Linux. Instead, they appreciate or even obsess about Microsoft software. Mono projects provide these boosters with the perfect opportunity to infect other, unwitting platforms with their obsession. For the past three years we have shown that it is Microsoft journalists who care the most about Mono and Moonlight releases and not Linux-focused reporters. It speaks volumes about the PR that has been invested to keep this patent-trap alive. It seems to be effective, because Mono has now spread to Android, as Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza gleefully announces in Twitter and in his blog:
Today we released Mono for Android 1.0 http://bit.ly/mono-android-1 and MonoTouch 4.0 http://bit.ly/monotouch-4 Enjoy!
Novell has renewed its efforts in the mobile arena by today announcing the availability of Mono for Android, a set of tools for developing .NET applications for the Android platform using Microsoft Visual Studio. Following the Mono Project’s core tenet of making Microsoft .NET applications capable of running cross-platform, Novell says that it is now enabling Visual Studio, .NET, and C# developers to utilize a common code base to create applications for the industry’s most widely-used mobile devices, including Android-based phones and tablets, Apple iPad, Apple iPod Touch, and Apple iPhone.
Guess who was pushing it onto the Slashdot crowd as though this community has interest in Microsoft development? Yes, this was submitted to Slashdot by an anti-Linux source of FUD which pretends to be pro-Linux so as to be quoted as criticising GNU/Linux. He goes by the name “hairyfeet” and some may be already familiar with it. That’s just the thing about Mono fans; they can pretend to have a following, but the followers are Microsoft enthusiasts, not GNU/Linux or Free software enthusiasts.
As this new article helps show, Microsoft is exploiting Novell to stay relevant in an age of migrations to GNU/Linux. Novell advertises Microsoft trademarks and proprietary software in its press release regarding the above. It’s an endorsement for Visual Studio and .NET. This gets reposted unchanged with all the marketing deception by some sites to get this sort of coverage from other sites [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. This helps Novell and Microsoft, but not GNU/Linux or even Android (which favours Java/Dalvik). It’s Microsoft news, not Android news, so no wonder Mary Jo Foley covers it, not to mention Ryan Paul, as usual (he gets flak for it from some readers).
It really seems to be the case that more and more people learn about the problems with Mono. For example take Novell’s Banshee, a patent trap with unique problems. Longtime promoters of Mono such as OMG! Ubuntupromote it, preceding or encouraging innocent users to do so too (users such as new Ubuntu entrants). Well, so does Jack Germain, who probably innocently gives a boost to this Trojan horse. Who does that benefit? It’s only good for .NET and for Microsoft, that’s who. As the one commenter (James E LaBarre) put it in relation to the new release announcement:
Is it still a Mono app? Then I’m not interested, regardless of how new or clever it may be.
“You can’t fight corruption with con tricks, they use the law to commit crimes…”
“Gangsters”, The Specials
As noted before (by de Icaza the other day), the obsession with .NET leads to other sorts of addiction and Microsoft toys (e.g. legacy Silver Lie), which even in an age when Microsoft nearly abandons the endeavourothers carry on (carrying water for Microsoft). Quoting The Inquirer: “SOFTWARE SPINNER Microsoft has put out a statement that tried to justify the existence of Silverlight, but ended up saying that HTML5 is better.”
Novell was still promoting Silver Lie APIs (even with press releases) back in February [1, 2]. It is very clear whose interests Novell is serving these days and more people ought to see that. █
What’s Microsoft’s is Microsoft’s and what’s Novell’s is also Microsoft’s
Summary: Spirit is low at Novell as companies which are boasting a market cap 100 times higher than NOVL take the customers away
IN a conversation with a friend the other day, it came up that Novell used to be a respected company back in the days. These days it’s a laughing stock and people whose living is made by administrating Solaris servers do not seem to even know that Novell has a GNU/Linux distribution (Ballnux), at least the one I spoke to. Microsoft has had Novell characterised as some Windows/Microsoft company, not a “Linux company” and Microsoft is taking Novell’s customers now that Novell is at the edge of a cliff. See thisfor example. Then, see this from the Microsoft boosters:
The service will replace Novell GroupWise software, which the school district is now running on its own servers. Live@edu will provide e-mail for 8,500 faculty and staff and high school students in the fall, Microsoft said today. The service and e-mails are stored in Microsoft’s data centers and accessed by students and faculty via the Internet.
Microsoft is slaughtering Novell (ignore the PR which neglects to mention business decline), but then again, so does Google. Both companies are competing to take personal data at taxpayers’ expense (Fog Computing enables this). Microsoft is very excited about this and we previously explained this excitement (Microsoft is fanatic about lock-in). Not only has the deal with Novell enabled it to turn Novell into a vassal; it also enabled Microsoft to grab Novell customers more easily (“interoperability” as they call it makes the transition easier) and grab Novell’s patents, which are handy for a fight against UNIX/Linux due to the nature of the patents.
Learn why deals with Microsoft are suicide. Just watch Novell. █
Posted in Novell at 6:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Interpretation of Novell’s situation based on the volume and the nature of news about it
THE “boycott Novell” push has been keeping an eye on “Novell” news since 2006. That’s about 5 years ago. Earlier this year “Novell” news got so scarce that there was hardly any point to keeping track of it. Apart from self-congratulating announcements [1, 2] (a form of PR) and the occasional mention of a fewformer Novell executives (PlateSpin too) moving to other companies, there is almost nothing to be found. When there is, it’s about proprietary software from Novell (and proprietary flaws [1, 2), not to mention fluff that's hardly even products. What is it that Novell employees even do these days? Mysterious. Some of Novell's staff is just throwing videos into YouTube (e.g. IDM videos [1, 2, 3] and this amateurish promotion which can be seen below).
Novell ceased to matter as a company quite a while back and when Elliot stepped up it was the death knell. The question is, what will happen with Novell’s market and Novell’s patents now? It’s a question we continue to investigate here. █
Posted in Novell, OpenSUSE at 5:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: As Novell implodes and people leave the OpenSUSE community in droves, there is little or no sign of future releases
NOVELL may be just days away from obsolescence and all it gets excited about these days are Microsoft projects like Mono and Moonlight (more on that later). When it comes to SUSE, Novell uses it almost exclusively to market its proprietary software such as Operations Center (see the SAP news, which says for example that “Novell has released new software designed to allow SAP users to integrate around its SUSE Linux open source operating system”) and the company relies on shallow coverage that gets used to promote Intelligent Workload Management and other such fluff, e.g. this marketing in the form of articles, because today's news is largely PR, even YouTube content. Watch this blatant PR piece about SUSE and the way Novell’s PR staff exploits it (it’s staged): “This month, the influential industry publication PRWeek recognized the program and wrote a case study about why it was so successful. We’re proud of the recognition and thank the thousands of Linux developers who participated (and if you missed it this year don’t worry – we’re planning a second competition in 2011).”
Andreas Jaeger, openSUSE Program Manager at Novell, has announced the results of the future versioning polls. As reported earlier a discussion concerning the versioning of openSUSE releases emerged with several interesting options. A polling structure was devised and today the decision is made.
Some of the ideas were to go to a Fedora-style whole number release version such as Fedora 14 or Fedora 15. Another was Ubuntu-style in which the version number reflected the release date such as Ubuntu 11.04 to mean the Ubuntu released in April 2011. Mandriva-style was also considered that uses the year with the minor number indicating the number of release for that year such as Mandriva 2010.2 (the second release in 2010). The most interesting was dubbed “octal” which means the next release would be “o 12″ or 012.
This was mentioned before. Basically, the OpenSUSE community has a crisis as it gets abandoned and OpenSUSE Weekly News is almost the only type of content being added to the site these days (the planet component aside, even a profile here and there). OpenSUSE is a dying distribution and Jack Wallen’s review of the release was titled “Will new openSUSE with KDE 4.6 bring distro back from obscurity?” Since our post which accumulated OpenSUSE reviews we have only found this one review, so it doesn’t seems to have resonated as a distribution worth reviewing. HOWTOs about OpenSUSE are few but they exist (for GNOME at least, and Novell has a lot of influence inside GNOME). We have researched further for a while, hoping to find evidence of a future release because there is no talk about the next release yet. Little (if any) was written about it in the news. The term “OpenSUSE 11.5″ appears not in blogs, just in unofficial or less official sources./placeholder pages, e.g. [1, 2, 3]. Some of these pages are almost blank.
Given that AttachMSFT expressed no commitment to OpenSUSE (just to SUSE), will there be a future for it? We doubt that. Even if they develop it, a high-profile release might never come. A fork is somewhat possible. █
Summary: SCO and son of SCO (Novell) are struggling to stay relevant to the public, help Microsoft agenda in the mean time, in exchange for Microsoft incentives
As mentioned in Groklawthe other day, SCO is getting the boot. The British technology press concurs [1, 2] and adds that “The US Securities and Exchange Commission has temporarily halted trading in SCO shares.” For a bit of background: “The software company, which filed for bankruptcy in September 2007, has been hampered by legal costs and falling sales, after a US judge ruled that Novell, not SCO, was the owner of the Unix and UnixWare copyrights.”
“AttachMSFT had been in touch with Elliott even before Elliott started hounding Novell, so it seems like this was coordinated.”Novell will be sold soon (probably with federal approval in 5 days, unless regulators can stop this because shareholders sure let it slide [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]) and Microsoft must be licking its lips with anticipation and expectation of receiving Novell patents. As a bit of recap from the news: “Hedge fund Elliott Associates was successful last year in pushing Novell to sell itself for $2.2 billion to Attachmate Corp, a data center software maker owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo.”
AttachMSFT had been in touch with Elliott even before Elliott started hounding Novell, so it seems like this was coordinated. It’s smacks of corruption. In any case, Novell as a company is pretty much dead (almost no news about it anymore) and due to the imminent sale its report got delayed and when it was finally released it was rubbish. Novell reported very bad results which show just how much deals with Microsoft pay off and the explanations for the losses are more like excuses; it’s not just due to the vulture fund (Elliott) and it’s not just due to tax, either. These numbers help show that Novell’s future may be more like SCO’s (whose copyrights were used to harass Linux, just as Novell patents are now being passed to Microsoft, which sues Linux with patents). Shame on Novell and good riddance.
Novell expects to have BrainShare 2011 in October, but there won’t be a Novell by then, unless a miracle happens. How long can Novell stay a publicly-traded company? Their employees spread libel us in the mean time. They also spread Microsoft APIs. █
Posted in Google, Novell at 4:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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. █
Summary: Monopolies and titans spread their monopolies and perpetuate the patent problems rather than strive to resolve them for about 99% of the businesses out there (those without a massive scale and monopoly)
A WHILE back we hoped that Apple would rethink its patent lust given the $625 million verdict against it, but this case is being overturned now:
A federal judge in Texas threw out an earlier verdict against Apple in a patent-infringement case with Mirror Worlds, overturning one of the largest settlements ever awarded in a patent case and fueling debate on software copyright in general.
How is Apple going to learn a lesson about software patents’ harm if not by cases like this one? Apple is currently suing the Linux-powered Android, which leads Google, for example, to resorting to patents too (much to the regret of the FFII). A longtime critic of the patent system calls it the “Nuclear Option” and says that “the exploding IP litigation in mobile will only get larger as Google angles to buy the mobile-patent equivalent of a thermonuclear device.” To quote the opening part:
In a blog post today, Google (GOOG) general counsel Kent Walker announced that the company had bid for Nortel’s patent portfolio. The $900 million offer makes Google the so-called stalking horse bidder: one that sets a high enough bottom line to keep others from low-balling the auction.
This is a major change for Google and an overt declaration that it will use its cash to obtain patents that could make life unpleasant for litigious competitors. Expect that the exploding IP litigation in mobile will only get larger as Google angles to buy the mobile-patent equivalent of a thermonuclear device.
Google would be wiser to give a billion dollars to the FFII and other groups which seek to abolish software patents. That would also help Google justify its “do no evil” motto.
What we are seeing these days is not just consolidation where few companies amass enormous power (e.g. Oracle buying Sun) but also a distortion of law that benefits the rich (e.g. tax exceptions for the super-rich, tax havens for large corporations only). Unless the people stand up behind groups like the FFII, FSF, EFF, etc. nothing is going to improve; it’s only going to get a lot worse. Patents are a symptom and a characteristic of this general trend. They solidify the power of the already-powerful over everyone else, essentially making “illegal” the act of competing. As we last showed yesterday, there is nothing ethical about patents; it’s protectionism, it’s selfishness. █
Resumen: Microsoft está haciendo fuego sobre la disidencia (para tiranos opresivos solamente) deliberadamente dejando a la gente que utiliza el software de Microsoft expuestos a la vigilancia y a otros abusos.
El tema del Software Free/Libre como herramienta de autonomía va muchos años atrás. Para que un usuario de la computadora esté en el control del software en vez de ser el sirviente de este software, hay características que necesitan estar presentes en el código. La FSF Fundación del Software Libre da una buena definición de estas características, aunque puedan haber otras. Richard Poynder explica cómo la Ciudadanía y el Software[http://poynder.blogspot.com/2011/03/of-citizenship-and-software.html] se relacionan uno con otro en una atmósfera donde el software está cada vez más politizado:
Lorenzo Lessig vino entender el poder del software para construir y formar nuestro mundo cuando él era (brevemente) “amo especial” durante el caso anticompetitivo contra Microsoft. Como él me lo expuso más adelante, “[T]u puedes escribir software sin embargo como usted quiera, producir cualquier clase de producto usted quiera. Y esa capacidad es única con software: usted no puede, por ejemplo, decir que un automóvil será algo que es una transmisión y una radio envueltas en una al mismo tiempo. Pero usted puede hacer exactamente eso con software, porque el software es tan plástico.
Como tal, él agregó, “el caso de Microsoft encajona era un ejemplo particular de un punto más general sobre cómo usted necesita entender la manera de la cual tecnología y política interactuan.”
Como todo, nuestras vidas son organizados y controlados cada vez más por las computadoras, y el papel que el software tiene en la sociedad llegan a ser cada vez más centrales, la mayoría de la gente asume que el mundo virtual que abren delante de ellos cuando encienden la computadora, y las opciones que son ofrecidos en la pantalla, sigue siendo cómo las cosas son y deben ser – no una consecuencia de la manera en la cual el software subyacente ha sido escrito.
La gente que utiliza el software de Microsoft son controla a totalmente por las inclinaciones políticas de Microsoft y esos gobiernos con los cuales Microsoft colabora (básicamente cualquier gobierno, por su propio beneficio). Las historias recientes de Rusia [1[http://techrights.org/2010/09/19/microsoft-pulls-a-wernher-von-braun/], 2[http://techrights.org/2010/09/14/dumping-against-gnu-linux-russia-ngo/], 3[http://techrights.org/2010/10/18/rewriting-history-about-dissent/]] son un recordatorio impactante de ello y la FFII (Fundación para una Infraestructura de Información Libre) divulgan que “Microsoft apagó HTTPS (Secure HTTP) en Hotmail en más de una docena de países”. Como André Rebentisch lo puso, “Hotmail no ofrece HTTPS para las naciones autoritarias”[http://arebentisch.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/hotmail-does-not-offer-https-for-authoritarian-nations/] y aquí están esas naciones en resumen:
Según un enlace secreto en EFF, Hotmail inhabilitó al parecer la opción implícita de https para sus usuarios que fijaron su localización en las naciones siguientes: Bahrein, Marruecos, Argelia, Siria, Sudán, Irán, Líbano, Jordania, Congo, Myanmar, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan.
Brad explica porqué “Los Activistas Políticos Necesitan Linux” – un tema que tratamos aquí muchas veces antes.
He insistido una y otra vez el consejo de los expertos de la seguridad de computadora: si usted debe utilizar Windows, no utilice Internet Explorer. E iré un paso más al futuro: si usted tiene alguna razón para creer usted puede ser perseguido por o atacado – debido a sus creencias políticas, o sus actividades económicas – entonces DEJE de USAR WINDOWS.
Hay también una interpretación de Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols[http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/did-microsoft-leave-hotmail-open-for-dictators/874]. Aquí tenemos otro más ejemplo de Microsoft dañando a los usuarios de computadoras. ¿La gente no aprenderá de Egipto sobre cómo los gobiernos identifican y arrestan la oposición después de la vigilancia eléctronica? █
