The scraps of Novell make small moves

Summary: The latest news from Xamarin and from Novell, which have totally lost their way by now

THE company known as Xamarin is a proprietary software powerhouse with emphasis on .NET. Its CTO does not use GNU/Linux at work. See the comments here and mind the headline which says the opposite of the real news (that Miguel de Icaza moved away from Linux).

Xamarin has a new proprietary (open 'core') product which is based on "an open-source version of Microsoft's .Net technology for programming in Microsoft's C# language." The article continues: "With the newest version of Mono for Android, C# programmers can produce software that will run natively on both Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich, and on Android tablets including Amazon's Kindle Fire and Samsung's Galaxy Tab, Xamarin said yesterday."

As we explained in the past, this is a sort of embrace-and-extend of Android. From Java/Dalvik to Microsoft's turf? Does anyone really need that? A few sites gave that coverage, but all in all, things were quiet. One article says:

"The big component is that we've caught up for Google," Miguel de Icaza, CTO of Xamarin, told InternetNews.com.

Google does not need .NET on its phones, so once again Mono is a solution in search of a problem (which does not exist). Novell in general offers a distribution that addresses a need nobody really has. The whole "IP peace of mind" line is just pure FUD and amid security issues and some blurbs about OpenSUSE we find this announcement of a product that arrives very late given the age of SLE* 11. To quote:

Novell and SUSE Linux may technically be separate companies, but they are owned by the same Attachmate conglomerate and they still have to work together on specific products, such as Open Enterprise Server, which bolts NetWare print and file services to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

"OES is Novell's operating system product that helps to provide a bridge to its legacy NetWare customers. The OES product line first debuted in 2005. With the new OES 11 release, Novell is basing the server on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 release, that debuted back in May 2010," as this article put it. What took it so long? The official word does not provide an answer and new material about SLE* is equally out of date. It is quite possible that turmoil inside Novell led to this procrastination. ⬆