06.08.11
Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 11:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A broken patent system from the United States is being championed and defended by Florian Müller, who lobbies for RAND and Linux tax in Europe where he lives and campaigns for profit (on behalf of unnamed/antisocial companies)
AGENTS of influence (or lobbyists) are at it again. Linux is gaining and Microsoft is running out of ideas, so just like its peon Facebook it is attacking Google with disinformation. It pays lobbyists to muddy the water. We sometimes refer to them as “mobbyists”.
There is an attempt to tax Linux from many directions, using software patents of course. Microsoft Florian has begun making noise about this type of reports:
Oracle sued Google last August, claiming Android infringes on seven of Oracle’s Java patents. Google has denied all wrongdoing.
Details of what Oracle wants in compensation have now emerged in a filing made Monday by Google in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The partially redacted filing targets conclusions made by Iain Cockburn, a Oracle legal expert on damages. Passages that appear to concern specific monetary figures are blacked out, but other sections provide a sense of the scope of royalties Cockburn says Oracle is owed.
If one actually checks the source of these claims, there is room for doubt. Florian is mass-mailing journalists (critical part of his business model) and plays along with this story whilst also smearing the OIN, which happens to have both Oracle and Google as members. It is true that the OIN is not a solution to the software patents problem. However, to think that Florian is against software patents is to ignore almost everything he actually says. To give an example of the OIN’s approach, it goes something like this (from a new announcement):
OIN simultaneously announced that it has acquired the underlying intellectual property, which includes nine patents and patent applications. The Distinguished Inventor Program is focused on entrepreneurial inventors, typically unaffiliated with large corporate entities, who have authored key technology patents.
This is not a solution, but it’s better than nothing. It’s IBM’s style of handling a problem in a way that helps IBM but hardly anybody else. We previously wrote about IBM's damage control and found it baffling that Florian apologises for/sympathises with IBM. It is probably because Microsoft Florian is being briefed by Microsoft PR agents, just like Maureen O'Gara, whom he is in touch with (as well as Enderle). Microsoft basically constructs stories against its competitors and then passes these to its attacks dogs. These so-called ‘IP’ attacks on Linux are coordinated and Twitter makes it a lot easier to see how it works (otherwise, Florian’s mass-mailing operation remains mostly hidden). Anyway, Pamela Jones took it upon herself to return to Groklaw and rebutted the latest nonsense from Microsoft Florian. It is a long and details post which states: “Because the oddest thing just happened. Redmond Magazine reveals that Microsoft sent it the news about a claims construction order from the ITC regarding a Microsoft complaint against Motorola, with some talking points, I gather, on what it thinks it means. And at more or less the same time, but slightly before, Mueller published an article on his blog with the same information about the same claims construction order and giving it the same meaning as Microsoft sent to Redmond Magazine. We know the timing because Redmond Magazine links to Mueller.
“But I can’t make the Redmond-Microsoft/Mueller math — which is highlighted in both articles as being significant — line up with the order itself. And while both articles opine that the order means that Microsoft’s patent claims against Motorola are going swimmingly, and hence Android is in trouble, the picture is a lot more complex, according to my research. It turns out there are several lawsuits between the parties, and in the patent litigation in district court, the most recent event is that Motorola motions to dismiss were granted in part and Microsoft motions to dismiss were denied. I’ll show you my research on all this.”
Watch how it concludes: “The last time there were some scary articles about a claim construction order, with some concluding that Oracle’s scoring points against Google in the number of claim construction terms the judge agreed with was a leg up for Oracle, I suggested that it was too early to tell what it meant and that journalists could save themselves embarrassment by just reading the filings themselves and not relying on Mueller or on any lobbyist for what they allegedly mean.”
People who really want software patents to end take the approach of the FFII or Fred Wilson [1, 2], who was on this panel about rejecting software patents the other day.
Last night during an Internet Week event at General Assembly, investors Fred Wilson, David Lee, and Chris Dixon took the stage to talk about a range of topics related to startups, including one that’s been a source of angst for many a startup: patents.
As a mobbyist, Florian has been effective because he pretends to be against software patents while in fact all he does its boost them and defame those who are truly against software patents. He also pretends to be a lover of Android. That’s what lobbyists tend to do for credibility. “I tried Linux, but…” █
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Posted in FUD, GPL at 10:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A closer look at those who disparage the GPL and where they come from
AS MY PH.D. is associated with statistics, I believe that I have the critical skills necessary to show, even without auditing the data, when methods are selected to fraudulently show outcomes that are false. When it comes to firms with origins at Microsoft, there is no data available. They keep it to themselves and they probably know why. While trying to gain power as spokespeople for FOSS, these firms do everything the proprietary way, even with software patents.
“Be sceptical of what you read regarding software licences. There is a war for people’s perception and people with media clout are being paid to change these perceptions.”On a couple of occasions this week we wrote about the latest numbers from Black Duck. One of the participants in this was funded by Microsoft. The other actually has Microsoft roots and it is this firm which gets challenged by Free software defenders because it “doesn’t give any information on how the three hundred new sites [for example get] added” (this included Microsoft sites at the time, as we mentioned repeatedly [1, 2] because Microsoft had announced a special partnership). The most problematic repository at the centre of all of this (so-called ‘analysts’ typically point at it) is maintained privately by Black Duck, which was founded by Mr. Levin and “in the early 1990s, Levin was a marketing manager at Microsoft,” say many reports like this one. Microsoft marketing, eh? We have a wiki page about the subject that we find so disturbing as firms like these discourage the use of copyleft licences. Microsoft does not like the GPL and it says that “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”
Given that SourceForge erroneously marked a GPL-licensed project of mine as Public Domain (I found this out by accident earlier today as I begin working on another FOSS project), there is a lot of room for bias and error. It is not surprising that analysts who are paid by Microsoft try to tell us that the GPL is declining. OpenLogic is also part of those messengers. It is headed by a guy from Microsoft. Be sceptical of what you read regarding software licences. There is a war for people’s perception and people with media clout are being paid to change these perceptions. By selecting methods and data in a proprietary way one can show anything and ‘prove’ anything (assuming the peers are gullible). █
“Mind Control: To control mental output you have to control mental input. Take control of the channels by which developers receive information, then they can only think about the things you tell them. Thus, you control mindshare!”
–Microsoft, internal document [PDF]
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Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 10:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another glaring reminder that the government is using proprietary software such as Windows to weaken opposition
We recently explained that the NSA likes a lot of Windows out there [1, 2, 3]. It is easy to intrude people’s PCs if those PCs run Windows. We also know that the FBI, for example, intrudes people's PCs if they run Windows and so something questionable. Behind Stuxnet, for example, was apparently the government's plot. A new article suggests that “one in four US hackers ‘is an FBI informer’”. So, which governments are still foolish enough to deploy Windows? The same goes for activists. ‘Cloud’ Computing is even worse because intrusion by those looking to abuse power becomes far easier. █
“It is no exaggeration to say that the national security is also implicated by the efforts of hackers to break into computing networks. Computers, including many running Windows operating systems, are used throughout the United States Department of Defense and by the armed forces of the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere.”
–Jim Allchin, Microsoft
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06.07.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Richard Stallman is the ultimate nerdish power geek.
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Server
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Kernel Space
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Unlike ten years ago, college graduates today are finishing school equipped with some Linux knowledge and preference.
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Linux Foundation will award five scholarships and host a student-focused day at LinuxCon designed to help train the developers who will shape the next 20 years of computing
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Applications
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Android as a mobile platform is gaining more and more popularity day by day. However, Google is still yet to design a program that allows its users to synchronize their media across their phone and computers.
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Proprietary
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Just under a year ago I wrote about how Adobe had abandoned 64-bit Linux, at least temporarily. Linux users who chose to run a 64-bit OS were left with a range of unsatisfactory choices: use an outdated beta with known security vulnerabilities; run an FOSS alternative, most likely gnash, despite limits in functionality and compatibility; or run a 32-bit browser in a 64-bit operating system. At the time the move was surprising since reviews of the 64-bit beta, like this one by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Computer World, were quite favorable.
Three months later on September 15, 2010, Adobe announced a preview of Flash Player “Square”, development code for an upcoming release of a native 64-bit version of Flash Player 10.2. Unfortunately Preview 3, released on November 10, 2010, was the last Square release. Flash Player 10.3 was released for 32-bit platforms only.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Wine development release 1.3.21 is now available.
What’s new in this release:
* Support for installation rollbacks in MSI.
* 8- and 16-bit bitmap formats in the DIB engine.
* Fixes in the XInput2 mouse support.
* Better support for text shaping in Uniscribe.
* Improvements to the Item common dialog.
* More MSVC runtime functions.
* Various bug fixes.
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Games
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E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, is officially kicking off today in Los Angeles and will be running through Thursday. This, along with the Game Developers Conference, is one of the key times of the year for the electronic gaming industry. A number of game studios will be announcing new titles and other great announcements, but will there be anything Linux related?
Only time will tell if there are any Linux-related announcements to be found this week. If we know of any, it’s of course under NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) at the moment. But here’s a few random notes for what can be said at this tim..
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- Linux Game Publishing is still working on something, but they won’t be at E3 and this next port of theirs with almost 100% certainty isn’t a triple-A title.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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I’m at the Platform 11 sprint at Randa. We are here to discuss and shape the future of the KDE platform. It’s the first meeting of this kind since Trysil five years ago. Four people who were at Trysil also made it to Randa, including a respectable dinosaur, but it’s great to also have new and very new faces around.
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Many scientists use the LaTeX typesetting system as the preferred way to write publications. Among the various widely used add-ons, one special mention is the TikZ language, a powerful extension which is used to create publication-quality figures. Of course, like LaTeX, it takes its time to learn. The good news is that, like with LaTeX there is KDE software to fill in this gap: KTikZ, a graphical front-end to TikZ.
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GNOME Desktop
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Like many of you, I split my time between two excellent browsers: Firefox and Chrome. Neither feels really all so native in GNOME3 — although Firefox, as it mimics GTK+2 by default, fits in just a little better. Every time I started Chrome, however, I felt a bit frustrated with how much of a sore thumb it stuck out and decided to do something about it.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Verdict:
Version 15 of Red Hat’s community project Linux distribution Fedora showed great stability, and it was simple to add applications onto the platform. We had no problem with hardware drivers and the new GNOME 3 GUI was easy to use, even though initially we did seem to be blundering about. Fedora would suit corporate road warriors who would like a combined Fedora-Windows dual-boot system (in case of OS failure), or anybody interested enough to see how far Linux has advanced compared to Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. Support for each Fedora version is limited to 13 months, so corporates would not roll Fedora out except to expert users. In any case, there’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) available, which eventually gets to use features that have cut their teeth in Fedora.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu corporate sponsor Canonical is developing a new Ubuntu Friendly hardware validation program for desktops, netbooks and laptops. The program will allow users to test hardware and the results of those tests will then be used to validate systems as “Ubuntu Friendly”. The program will be developed in parallel with the development of Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot, and should be in place by the time Oneiric Ocelot is released in October.
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The man behind the distribution Mark Shuttleworth already had a few ideas to earn money with the project. Ubuntu includes a Music Store, a Cloud Service for data storage and synchronization and commercial apps in the Software Center (which is quite similar to Apple’s App Store).
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I guess the biggest enhancement for me is not so much related to Ubuntu. It’s that I completely deleted my Windows partition, with everything in it, i.e., everything I had before is now gone.
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Used responsibly, instant messaging (IM) offers the benefit of instant communication and collaboration on the corporate intranet. However, many companies, fearing IM’s adverse affect on productivity, tweak their corporate firewalls to block all ports ferrying IM traffic. A better approach is to control the IM server by bringing it in-house. The Java-based cross-platform Openfire application makes it easy to host your own instant messaging server.
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Events
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Hacking, learning, talking, walking and dining – The Linux Bier Wanderung (Linux Beer Hike) is all this and much more. Each summer around 50 Linux enthusiasts meet up for a week’s holiday. This year the 13th annual event takes the penguin-friends to Austria, specifically to the small village of Lanersbach in the Tux valley [1].
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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With the advancement of web technologies, it is not surprising that the web and web applications are increasingly playing an important part of our experience on the computer. In the coming week, Google is releasing its first Chromebooks – netbooks which are based completely on a cloud OS and in which the traditional desktop has been replaced by the web browser. Mozilla too has released the first concept of something along that line.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Michael Meeks published some interesting statistics on the completeness of the OpenOffice source code contributed to the Apache Software Foundation. His numbers actually came from a post from Christian Lohmaier to The Document Foundation discussion mailing list.
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Oracle’s donation of the OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation does no favours for the users or developers of open office suites, says Richard Hillesley…
Speaking at the time of Sun’s decision to release Java under the GNU General Public License (GPL), Marc Fleury, the founder of JBoss, claimed that “IBM reacted negatively” to the Sun announcement because “IBM’s approach to open source is what we call ‘strip mining’, which is to let the open source community do things – then IBM comes and packages them, adds proprietary code, and markets the result,” and concluded that “they have this dual strategy of proprietary products and low-end open source.”
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CMS
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His solution is a proposal to pull together a crack team of journalists, designers and technologists to devise some open source software that would combine the best elements of the Huffington Post, WordPress and I Can Haz Cheezburger.
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Education
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I have long saved money in education by using GNU/Linux on PCs and on thin clients with zero licensing costs. I always chuckle when I read the anguish of some people trying to eke out similar savings with that other OS. Yes you can save money by using thin clients with that other OS because thin clients are cheaper and CALs are cheaper than full licences (just barely) but the maths is really simple with GNU/Linux. $0 beats all other licensing regimes of that other OS. No need to agonize over four plans each with negotiated prices to work things out. Install GNU/Linux and go.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This is where GNU Free Call most clearly differs from most others who are looking to replace Skype. As GFC is already designed for use with any SIP capable client, we have no interest in re-inventing protocols or even how VOIP clients work. This is not the problems we are looking to solve. Rather than focusing on having people join or connect through yet another specific service provider to mediate their communications (whether iptel.org, ekiga.net, etc), we are interested in enabling anyone to discover and communicate with each other directly without the need for a mediating service at all. It is how users are empowered to discover each other which is hence most important in GFC’s design. This is best illustrated by the GFC client, which is in reality contact focused rather than communication driven. This I think becomes more clear from the GFC GUI design (and experimental client), as illustrated here.
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Project Releases
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VideoLAN and the VLC development team present VLC 1.1.10, a minor release of the 1.1 branch. This release brings a rewritten pulseaudio output, an important number of small Mac OS X fixes, the removal of the font-cache building for the freetype module on Windows and updates of codecs.
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Though it doesn’t typically come with EVERY Linux distro (it really should..), vlc is one of the most popular, and powerful open source media playing programs around.
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Public Services/Government
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Systems integrator (SI) Computacenter has taken fire in a growing bust-up over open source software at Bristol City Council, which MPs have been told proves the government’s open source ICT strategy is unworkable, writes Mark Ballard.
In a letter to MPs sitting on the Public Administration Select Committee, open source supplier Sirius Corporation said Bristol City Council had ditched its latest effort on the advice of its supplier Computacenter.
Mark Taylor, CEO at Sirius, accused Computacenter of skewing an open source proof-of-concept pilot in favour of vendor partner Microsoft.
Taylor told MPs this showed how the UK’s “oligopoly” of systems integrators ensured Cabinet Office open source policy “cannot and will not work”.
Computacenter and Sirius bid for the Bristol deal after the Council Cabinet voted to adopt an open source computing infrastructure last September, said the letter.
However Sirius claims it was thrown off the project after the two disagreed over its viabililty.
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Money is now much tighter in the public sector, so we’re wondering how the council is going to pay for the Office 2010 licence, particularly as council tax has been capped. Will public services and/or staff be cut to pay for the Counts Louse’s largesse to Microsoft? Perhaps someone – councillor or officer – from BCC would like to comment below.
Finally, another indirect effect of BCC’s return to the closed source fold is that this will have a negative effect on efforts to have Open Document Format (ODF) adopted as the standard means of exchange for public documents – something that is a reality in some of the UK’s EU partners.
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More SMEs testified in secret to the PASC inquiry in May. They were fearful their complaints about the systems integrators’ oligopoly – said to control 80% of the UK’s £19bn-a-year public sector ICT – would lead to their exclusion from government contracts.
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Taylor’s letter to MPs alleged Bristol City Council had, in September 2010, asked its supplier at the time, Capgemini, to complete a pilot of the open source software stack by November. Capgemini simply ignored the request, said Taylor’s statement.
Capgemini was unavailable for comment.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Robotics wizard and two-time Battlebots champion Christian Carlberg first achieved notoriety shredding competitors’ robots with Minion’s 14-inch saw blade on one of TV’s first reality shows. Now he’s all fired up to begin shipping what may prove to be the “world’s first open source flashlight.”
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Programming
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Developers building atop platforms like iOS and Twitter should go in with eyes wide open, said Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson, who reminded entrepreneurs about the dangers of relying on someone else’s APIs. In a talk last night before an audience of entrepreneurs, Wilson said developers need to plan for the day when platform owners work against their interests.
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By ManuSporny On June 3, 2011 In RDFa, Semantic Web With 41 Comments Permanent Link to The False Choice of Schema.orgPermalink
Full disclosure: I am the current Chair of the group at the World Wide Web Consortium that created RDFa. That said, all of this is my personal opinion – I am not speaking on behalf of the W3C or my company, Digital Bazaar. I am biased, but also have been around long enough to know when freedom of choice on the Web is being threatened.
Some of you may have heard that Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have just released a new uber-vocabulary for the Web. As the site explains, if you use schema.org, you will get a better looking search listing on all of the search listings for Bing, Google and Yahoo. While this may sound good on the surface, it is very bad news for choice on the Web. There are few points that I’d like to make in this post:
1. RDFa and Microdata markup are similar for the schema.org use cases – they should both be supported.
2. Microdata doesn’t scale as easily as RDFa – early successes will be followed by stagnation and vocabulary lock-in.
3. All of us have the power to change this as the Web community – let’s do that. We will release a plan shortly.
The schema.org site makes it appear as if you must pick sides and use Microdata if you want preferential treatment. This is a false choice!
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Security
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Finance
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Two burly Collier County sheriff’s deputies and a homeowner’s attorney strode into the Bank of America branch on Davis Boulevard in Naples with a court order and an ultimatum for Manager Erich Fahrner.
Fahrner’s choice: Write out a check for $2,534 in attorney’s fees for the couple wrongfully slapped with a foreclosure lawsuit by the bank, or a William C. Hoff Storage moving crew waiting outside would start hauling out furniture to be sold at public auction.
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It’s telling that the first salvo is being leaked through Wall Street’s favorite reporter. Now it’s possible the firm was using Sorkin as a one-man focus group to test and refine their messaging and have him all prepped to go. Sorkin says he’s been in communication with Goldman officials “for the past several weeks”. But this may also indicate that the firm intends to make its case to the press and then let the press persuade the public.
I see that as a sign of serious weakness. The Levin committee provides a great deal of documentation to the public as well as a detailed summary of its findings. By contrast, Wall Street firms make an art form of cherry picking numbers and presenting them in isolation. And journalists don’t have enough knowledge of tradecraft to push back in a serious way.
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Internet/Net Neutrality (Canada)
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Every time you think the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the CRTC, has finally been chastised and in the process, learned a lesson, the bozos who run the circus come up with a new and silly act meant to help the broadcasters. And, as is usual with these folks, somehow ends up diminishing our choices as consumers and costing us more money in the long run.
Last time the genius’ at the CRTC had the brilliant notion that behemoths Rogers and Bell should have the right to tell their sub-buyers like Teksavvy what they could charge for internet use. This blew up in the CRTC’s face when most Canadians saw through the money grab by the big providers and began a protest that made the suggestion disappear faster than a Liberal leader in the 21st century.
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The Conservatives hold their convention later this week with 80 resolutions being considered for possible debate in the plenary session. The resolutions are proposed by local chapters and at least two focus on Internet access and net neutrality. Resolution P-063 (Durham) on broadband states:
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Departments and agencies are hoarding hundreds of patents and copyrights each year, violating the federal government’s long-standing rules on so-called intellectual property, says a new report.
For more than 10 years, federal policy has been to assign contractors the rights to any intellectual property produced during their work for departments and agencies.
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The government delivered its Speech from the Throne on Friday, which included a commitment to “introduce and seek swift passage of copyright legislation that balances the needs of creators and users.”
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Copyrights
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The music industry has backflipped on its long-held demands that repeat music pirates be disconnected from the internet as a new UN report declares such a policy would be a breach of human rights and international law.
But film studios, represented by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), are still backing the controversial measures, arguing protection of intellectual property is a human right. It has released research saying film piracy costs the Australian economy $1.37 billion a year.
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Revisions to the Copyright Act are essential to Canada’s digital economy strategy as incentive to move the creative economy forward, and also to satisfy demands by its trading partners that Canada implement the WIPO “Internet Treaties”. Bill C-32, which died with the election call, included many new exceptions from infringement and some confusing language that would have led to costly litigation. It was clear that many proposed changes, some unintentionally, eroded creators’ rights.
Arts and culture industries provide over 630,000 jobs and contribute $46 billion to Canada’s economy. Copyright revision should be supportive of these industries, big and small, and encourage their growth. The works of creators are the foundation of all such industries. A bill like C-32 would make it significantly more difficult for creators to carry on their copyright-reliant businesses, cause them significant income losses, and be a real barrier to the continuing growth of Canadian digital content and Canada’s digital economy.
HUGE explosion on the Sun on June 7, 2011
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in Novell, OpenSUSE at 5:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Hardships for OpenSUSE following the Microsoft patent deal at the end of 2006; we take stock of the past fortnight’s news and predict where the project is going
OPENSUSE news is relatively scarce (things dropping off) and it includes stuff like security issues and HOWTOs [1, 2]. Novell’s PR department seems to be somewhat defunct, which doesn’t help this project either.
In a rare post from Novell’s PR blog (mostly inactive these days) there is this statement about “Oracle’s Contribution of OpenOffice.org to Apache”. It generally speaks about LibreOffice (which has some correlation/connection with Go-OO). Being an IBM partner, Novell feels obliged to state: “SUSE is looking forward to the future contributions of IBM and potentially others into this new ASF incubator project, but would certainly have liked to see such contributions go directly to LibreOffice. We will follow the incubation process very closely to understand future opportunities and possibilities which can improve our offerings for our users and customers.”
“Novell’s PR department seems to be somewhat defunct, which doesn’t help this project either.”One of the promotional Novell blogs has gone rather quiet, with just a few updates here and there (about SUSE Studio). Thanks to Google’s funding (GSoC) there is still some development activity making it into the Planet [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. Google unfortunately gave some money to Mono in the past; OpenSUSE itself is being used as a ramp for Mono intrusion. There are generally positive sides to this GNU/Linux distribution (like medical spins [1, 2]), but the issue is that OpenSUSE helps Mono and SUSE, which helps Microsoft make money out of GNU/Linux and make it normal for Free software to be taxed by Microsoft.
Richard Hillesley has this good new article titled “Novell’s open source legacy – wake up, little SUSE” (Hillesley is a Mono sceptic). Yes, the project is getting smaller and it needs to consider becoming independent (which it is not).
The major part of Novell’s investment in open source was SuSE. Soon after the Novell acquisition SuSE became SUSE with a capital “U”, and Novell remodeled the SUSE Linux offerings with an enterprise desktop offering (SLED), an enterprise server offering (SLES), and a community edition (openSUSE), which plays the same role as Fedora plays for Red Hat, prototyping technologies for enterprise editions.
The image and fate of SUSE among the wider community, if not among its friends in other developer communities, has been coloured by Novell’s policy mishaps – love-ins with Microsoft, patent indemnifications and ‘mixed source’ portfolios, and the undercutting of Red Hat support contracts. But SUSE can hope for redemption with its new-found independence and reputation for solidity and technical excellence, assuming it takes a leaf from Red Hat’s book, rediscovers its free and open source heritage and sells it as a virtue, not a hindrance.
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The openSUSE board is currently working on the practicalities of such a development which “as they are very determined to make it happen, is therefore very likely to happen – I personally hope before the next openSUSE conference”, says Jos Poortvliet, the openSUSE community manager.
Amid lack of strategy and downtimes, Poortvliet does damage control. He is an employee in charge of the OpenSUSE community/activities/PR along with more senior and technical people like Andreas Jaeger who help the project orientation-wise and coach Poortvliet. He announced this first milestone in an official blog which is hardly active anymore, except items like this one (the volunteers make up for it, along with developers). It’s a shame about the OpenSUSE Web site. It used to be well populated, but now it is mostly Poortvliet and a small ‘choir’ there (and he posts about other subjects too while not busy at Attachmate).
We are not entirely sure what will happen to OpenSUSE. There is no clear obligation to it from Attachmate. Currently it relies on the goodwill of some people and on GSoC. Why not just fork it and go independent? █
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Posted in Novell at 4:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More Novell vice presidents such as Dave Cutler and Carlos Montero-Luque are confirmed to have left; they won’t be obligated to Microsoft anymore
AS we explained just over a month go, Novell layoffs are not human causalities. It is most likely that all those who lost their job at Novell will simply find another job elsewhere. That’s capitalism. Novell as a public company is dead, especially after a deal with Microsoft put the patents in Microsoft’s hands. The Microsoft deal obviously left it robbed and naked, just like Linspire. They just never learn, do they? Anyway, news about Novell is extremely scarce now, but it allows us to see who is going where.
Looking elsewhere at what happened to departing Novell staff (Attachmate installed a new leadership, more obedient to other causes), Ivancic gets assigned as follows:
THE Attachmate Group has unveiled a new executive leadership team across its global business units, including the appointment of Boris Ivancic as vice-president and general manager for Asia-Pacific.
More here: “The Attachmate Group today announced a new executive leadership team across its global business units, with the appointment of Boris Ivancic as vice president and general manager for Asia Pacific. In his expanded role, Ivancic will be responsible for driving customer success and developing market opportunities for Attachmate, NetIQ, Novell and SUSE across Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Japan and Singapore.”
One who participated in the sale of Managed Objects to the now-dead Novell is making his move (also noted here):
His accomplishments include achieving double digit year on year growth at both CA and Managed Objects, managing the successful acquisition of Platinum Technologies and Sterling Software on behalf of CA, and participating in the sale of Managed Objects to Novell Inc.
Carlos Montero-Luque, a Novell Vice President, makes his move as well:
Montero-Luque brings to Apperian an extensive background in engineering. He joins the company from Novell, where he held several positions, including Vice President, Business and Product Management for SUSE Linux; Chief Technical Officer for Security and Identity Management; and Vice President, Engineering, for the ZENworks product suite.
Someone who is labelled “the partner sales manager for the Quebec business unit of Novell Inc.” is mentioned here:
During his tenure, he grew the company sales from $8 million to $50 million. Before joining Averna, Mr. Zuchowski was the partner sales manager for the Quebec business unit of Novell Inc.
Steve Hale, whose departure from Novell we mentioned here before, gets mentioned here:
Most recently, he served as vice president, global channel sales, at Novell in the security, systems management and operating platform group. He’s also managed worldwide and regional channel programs at companies including Microsoft and F5 Networks.
Another Novell Vice President, Dave Cutler, finds a new home based on the report which says: “Cutler was most recently Appoints Veteran Customer Services Leader Dave Cutler to Vice President of Worldwide Customer Support Vice President, Global Technical Support, at Novell, Inc.” See the official press release about this appointment.
This collapse of Novell does not prevent some companies from quoting a vice president, Scott Lewis. This says that “[i]n early May, for example, a desire to consolidate Novell skill sets prompted Novacoast to buy another Novell solution provider, Data Technique Inc., which has developed an innovative cloud identity management service.
“In a statement announcing the merger, Novell Inc. vice president of partner marketing Scott Lewis, said: “Novacoast’s acquisition of Data Technique Inc. is a significant channel development for Novell customers. This merger combines the reach and service levels of two strong Novell Partners for our shared customers.”
Scott Lewis is apparently still at the company. At Novell’s PR blog it is only Amie that’s left (as noted before, it is just more PR for proprietary products), so maybe a lot of the PR staff got laid off). Despite activities like this demo at Novell’s campus, a lot of the staff that worked there was laid off. The account Novelldemo keeps uploading many more videos on Vibe and there are several more from Novell Polska. Maybe a spillover of whatever remained in the marketing pipeline? Either way, we are seeing the death of Novell in the news after almost 5 years of the “Boycott Novell” push.
It would be useful to have a list of who stays and who walks away or gets laid off. This would help determine what Attachmate, a Microsoft partner, is likely to do with SUSE and other assets (more on that in the next post). Attachmate is slicing the company known as “Novell” and shelving it under other management. Assets are being folded (or renamed/rebranded/reassigned) to be vanished from their former identities. Growth by layoffs? Surely not. █
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Posted in Antitrust, Courtroom, Mail, Microsoft, Novell, Office Suites at 3:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Customers continue to replace GroupWise and Techrights wonders what Attachmate will do about the WordPerfect case
Attachmate, a Microsoft partner, has bought Novell while leaving Mono out in the cold and letting Microsoft take the patents. The thing is, Attachmate has hardly said anything about GroupWise. A tricky situation for sure as the product keeps bleeding. EAT is the latest large user to dump it. From the news: “The chain rolled out the cloud-based Apps productivity suite seven months ago to help meet its goal of doubling the size of its business. It replaced a 10-year-old Novell GroupWise system.”
There is more about it here and here:
The migration involved a move away from Novell Groupwise.
Cesar Ramanauskas, systems engineer at EAT, says in a blog post, “In preparation for our goal of doubling in size, EAT migrated to Google Apps for Business, after more than a decade of using Novell GroupWise.”
Inaction from Attachmate cannot help much, can it? But the elephants in the room are actually SUSE, the SCO case, and the Microsoft case. Will Attachmate dump the case against its partner, Microsoft? We are not sure what might happen with the antitrust case because Attachmate never mentions it and the Microsoft booster portrays it as just a “headache” when he argues:
But Microsoft’s antitrust problems aren’t ending just yet. Another old case involving WordPerfect, the once widely used word prcoessor, has been resurrected by a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling overturning a previous judgment in favor of Microsoft and allowing the case being pursued by Novell to proceed. Novell, now owned by Attachmate, owned WordPerfect for a couple of years in the mid-1990s before selling it to current owner Corel.
Some of us think that Microsoft toys around with Skype and Nvidia simply because of loose/lenient oversight. █
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