Summary: More news about Novell's products, the staff under Attachmate's wing, and a bit about Novell's patents, which end up helping Microsoft

TODAY we will leave aside SUSE news (SUSE is looking for funding of ARM projects despite Microsoft already paying SUSE) and instead we will dedicate some coverage to Novell.

In the news we found an update about this legal case against Novell. There are some old legal cases involving Novell, one of which (against Microsoft) we will deal with separately.

Here are memories of Novell as recalled by a Radio World article: "The initial equipment consisted of a Novell server and three DOS-based workstations. The workstations had no internal storage. They booted from a floppy drive and connected to the server to playback audio from there.

"It was great for playing back promos, underwriting, etc., but what about the music? Storage space was expensive; but in 1999 we purchased a whopping 300 GB RAID system to attach to our Novell server."

Further down it says: "We replaced our old Novell workhorse server with a new 1.2 TB Windows server to meet the audio storage requirements for two stations and the new ContentDepot system. We also purchased an option to have multiple libraries in order to prevent ContentDepot from overwriting our existing audio."

They are not alone. While Novell fails to find new customers existing ones are leaving and we found many examples in this month's news, starting with this:

The projects were the culmination of a five-year computer replacement plan. A second phase begins in October, which includes moving the district’s network from Novell/Linux to Windows servers running Active Directory. Cook said that when Novell discontinued some of its products, CPSD was put in a position where it had to put in new servers.

How about evidence that, contrary to Novell spinners, partners ("SKyPRO Announces Enterprise Texting For Novell GroupWise") and expensive events, Groupwise is losing? We gave many examples before (large-scale losses).

Here is another new story:

As of July 25, the district switch from Novell to Microsoft computer services has brought changes for both staff and students in getting work done at school, according to Scott Burns, Cleveland’s tech support teacher.

Another one says: "At the District level, monies have been invested to upgrade the network backbone from Novell to Microsoft."

We are seeing some former Novell staff and people who sold their company to Novell moving between companies and appearing in different places. Novell's current staff (rebranded as Attachmate staff) goes after children:

Rowland Bolman, a representative from Novell, said his company was looking to hire approximately 40 positions in testing, tech support, information technology and development.

A lot of Novell's venom, the software patents, has been passed to Microsoft and Apple and based on this news report we can see where the valuation came from:

Ocean Tomo has been involved in the valuation of patent portfolios for the likes of Novell, Interdigital, and Eastman Kodak. Michael noted that when they had first looked at Interdigital, it had $13 in cash, $16 per share in 3G IP, and had a stock price of $29. The company’s 4G patent portfolio was effectively free.

More on Novell’s patent portfolios can be read here:

During the Q&A session, a number of analysts questioned Page and the rest of the Google management team on how the company is protecting the Android ecosystem from competitors—referring, of course, to the joint effort on the part of Microsoft, Apple, and RIM (among others) to buy up Nortel’s and Novell’s patent portfolios with the express purpose of keeping them away from Google. If Google had been able to purchase the patents, it would’ve prevented competitors from being able to sue them for patent infringements.

Novell essentially helped the patent war against Linux. Well done, Novell. Well done for nothing. We saw that coming. ⬆