02.03.12
Posted in Novell at 6:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A roundup of news about former Novell staff and where that staff is moving these days
NOVELL is a relic, but one that has become almost synonymous with old networks. Novell is no longer a company, let alone one that boasts having about 12,000 members of full-time staff.
Mr. Taylor, a former Novell senior, becomes CFO at Adaptive Computing and the respective press release says:
Mr. Taylor also served as the Director of Finance and Group Controller for the Product Development Organization at Novell, where he worked extensively in the product planning process.
Here is the story of a man who served/advised companies sold to Novell:
Syed, managing principal at PredictSoft LLC, moved to Shrewsbury in early 2005 and has since been driving new initiatives, including funding high-tech companies to drive entrepreneurs to come up with better software products that enhance business productivity. Over the last two years, he has been an investor and adviser to companies that were sold to Novell, Cisco Systems, McAfee and Intel. These companies created jobs in Massachusetts and California.
Another new hire:
Butterfield is the founder and managing partner of SageCreek Partners, where he helps companies with their go-to market, recruiting, finance and business development initiatives. Before SageCreek, he guided Altiris to eight consecutive years of profitability, overseeing growth in revenue from $3 million to more than $300 million. He had similar results at Vinca Corporation, Legato, Novell and WordPerfect. Butterfield is the winner of the 2002 Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.
More Novell connections here:
Masie worked for 8 years in the USA at Novells head office in Utah as a Global Corporate Technology Strategist. On his return to South Africa he assumed the role of country manager of Novell and thereafter developed, established and launched Google South Africa.
Masie is mentioned here as well:
Masie worked for eight years in the USA at Novell’s head office in Utah as a Global Corporate Technology Strategist.
Here is Semel, another familiar person who left, finding his place at a new company:
Mr. Semel joins IntraLinks after serving as senior vice president, general counsel and secretary of Novell, Inc. Previously, Mr. Semel served as chief legal officer and corporate secretary at Tele Atlas N.V., a Dutch Euronext company providing digital mapping and navigation solutions. Mr. Semel also served as vice president, general counsel and secretary of Ascential Software Corporation, a provider of enterprise data integration, and vice president, general counsel and secretary of NaviSite, Inc.
Corey becomes Chief Revenue Officer and the press release says:
Prior to USWeb, he served as vice president at Novell’s $1.2 billion NetWare systems business. More recently,
More information can be found here.
More former Novell staff is mentioned in other articles, but these people are not as prominent. For instance:
A seasoned executive, he has held various senior management positions in both start-up and large enterprise companies including Novell Inc., the pioneer in local area networking. At Novell he led marketing, product management, developer and strategic relations organizations.
One who moved to McAfee is already leaving:
She joined the vendor in summer 2009, arriving from an equivalent position at Novell. According to McAfee, she has moved on “to pursue new opportunities”. She is replaced as UK and Ireland vice president by Ross Allen.
Job hopping already?
Other former Novell employees ended up in this company. For example, to quote this new report from Canada:
The move to the worldwide role at McAfee puts Struthers on what he calls his “fourth continental hop.” After starting out in South Africa, he moved to Dubai for Novell about ten years ago, reporting into EMEA. Then it was off to Asia Pacific, based in Australia, for McAfee. And now, onto North America.
The bottom line is, a lot of people whom we know from Novell (where they were managers) are no longer with Novell or even with Attachmate. Novell is where people stay to sink with a ship. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Apple, Microsoft, Novell, Windows at 6:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Back to being an addons company
Summary: PR spin from Novell and money-grabbing moves that promote proprietary software rather than Free/Open Source software
OVER in YouTube, Novell keeps advertising Vibe [1, 2, 3], but how long might it take to see the Windows bias of this product? Well, here we have it right from Novell’s own mouth:
Novell Vibe Add-in for Microsoft Office lets you create or update a document in Vibe directly from MS Office. The new Vibe Add-in feature is integrated into the MS Office environment so users can seamlessly edit and save files directly into Vibe in near real time without leaving the comfort of their MS Office environment.
We previously showed how other Novell communication products got integrated with Microsoft Skype, a reminder of which is here.
Novell’s other products now target Macs, but still, not a word about GNU/Linux. To quote a press release about GroupWise 2012 and something else about Mac support, GroupWise now boasts “iPad support”. More of that Mac hype can be found here, in one among few Novell announcements that we can find. The point we are trying to make is, Novell does nothing to advance GNU/Linux or even Open/LibreOffice in the enterprise. This was very different before the deal with Microsoft. In fact, Novell gave its patents to Microsoft and Apple.
As we find in the news, more GroupWise customers are ditching the platform. Here is one new example:
Utah will be moving off Novell GroupWise, which currently is being used by the state’s executive branch. Novell is based in Provo, Utah.
Even Utah rejects Novell. What a blow. Considering the roots of Novell, this is symbolic too. This other new article states that:
When Macomb County officials a year ago began researching the best method to replace its existing Novell GroupWise technology, the Sheriff’s Office expressed concerns over security.
“I’m all for saving money and doing what’s right on the taxpayer side, but until we have assurances that information is going to be sent securely, we’re going to stay on the GroupWise platform,” said Sheriff Anthony Wickersham, who is concerned about emailing criminal information, driver’s license records and addresses.
GroupWise is not secure either. It’s all very perceptual and Novell used FUD in this case.
Here we have another company that tells us about Novell getting quite rusty in the enterprise:
Much interest in Resara Server has come from Netware users, who are under pressure to modernize their networks. With Novell’s future uncertain, and the prospect of a costly investment in Suse Linux Enterprise or Microsoft Active Directory, Resara Server offers an attractive and cost-effective exit strategy. “The direction of Novell’s products in recent years required us to look at other options”, says Daniel Hedblom, System Administrator for the Sollefteå school district in Sweden. “We moved to Suse from Netware, but the resource needs for mono and .net made Zenworks unusable for us. Resara Server and Samba4 is a much cleaner solution, and we are glad to have found it”.
Novell’s future is indeed “uncertain”; the company itself was sold and the buyer is grappling with debt while GroupWise, for instance, keeps losing customers and the spin department says that there is momentum even where there is none (GroupWise is being ditched in large deployments). To quote:
It’s a new day for Novell and GroupWise, and the future is bright.
It’s nonsense. It’s Novell’s “PR blog” and it shows. Over at YouTube too it’s just a lot of promotional/marketing videos for GroupWise [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11] spread artificially by marketers rather than users. A look at Novell news summaries [1, 2] reveals more of a rotting company which is now clinging onto proprietary software (even Microsoft and Mac promotion) for cash. Novell deserves no sympathy from the FOSS world. It had its good days but in 2006 it defected. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Finance, Novell at 11:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Lost in the market
Summary: The company that bought Novell has a poor outlook, financial issues, and little signs of expansion/renaissance
THE CIRCUMSTANCES under which Novell got sold were mysterious to say the least. Nowadays, Novell products are still traded and marketed under the Novell brand, but the owner is not Novell. To quote a new example:
NetIQ’s partner ecosystem includes more than 600 MSPs and resellers that serve over 12,000 business customers in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). The release arrives roughly one year after NetIQ gained identity and security management solutions from Novell, which Attachmate acquired.
We do not hear much from NetIQ. Then again, there is hardly any news from Novell and Attachmate, either. When there is news it is often bad news (like departures), but how about this from the business press? Attachmate wants loans:
Attachmate Corp. (ATTM), a systems infrastructure software provider, is seeking $400 million in loans to fund a dividend to sponsors, according to a person with knowledge of the transaction.
A $300 million incremental first-lien term loan due in April 2017 will pay 5.75 percentage points more than the London interbank bank offered rate, said the person, who declined to be identified because the terms are private. Libor, the rate banks say they can borrow in dollar from each other, will have a 1.5 percent floor.
Attachmate also needed to borrow money to buy Novell. Moody’s, a corrupt analysts firm, downgrades Attachmate to negative outlook:
Moody’s revises Attachmate’s outlook to negative after dividend announcement, affirms B2 rating
Might Attachmate just die in a matter of years, just like Novell? Here is another news report about those loans. We are going to keep track of that in months to come. Later today we’ll write more about Novell. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, OpenSUSE at 11:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Novell being emptied, then SUSE
Summary: Key people continue to leave SUSE and the distribution is left without a compelling sales pitch
THE brain drain at SUSE continues as many of the familiar names, not just Greg K-H, are leaving the Microsoft-funded SUSE. It’s funny that some of them will be serving SUSE’s competition, e.g. by maintaining a kernel from RHEL for 10 years.
None of this exodus should be surprising to people who have followed SUSE in recent years (as we have). The project lost momentum, it has become quiet, and Attachmate seems reluctant to invest much in it (more on Attachmate’s financial problems later). One of the executives of SUSE moves on to join other former SUSE executives:
ownCloud Inc., the commercial entity behind the popular open source file sync and share project, announced today that former SUSE executive and ownCloud co-founder Holger Dyroff, has joined the company as vice president, sales and marketing.
There are other SUSE people in there, as we showed in the past. And to quote a very recent article from CMS Wire:
ownCloud was formally founded last year, and in December the project announced that former SUSE and Novell executive, Markus Rex, would be joining the company as CEO and CTO.
Basically, SUSE has lost a lot of its leadership. Those who deny this would struggle to put together a counter-argument. Here at Techrights we faced the facts when Microsoft and Novell lied to the world about their patent deal and we still adhere to realism in this age of excessive PR and spin.
As Sean Michael Kerner put it the other day, one of the people behind OpenSUSE “Gives SUSE the Boot” and:
The move means that he’s leaving SUSE – that’s right kaput, no more SUSE for him.
He is one of the key people behind OpenSUSE’s formation, so all that’s left of the project is some tiny community and under-funded SUSE (partly funded by Microsoft). Here is an example of volunteer work:
I’ve been playing around a bit with SUSE Studio and I’ve created ‘moniz’, a openSUSE 12.1 based image with Cinnamon as default Desktop Environment. Currently it’s in a very Alpha state and it’s mainly the result of a series of tests to the functionality of SUSE Studio. I’m going to work more on this but locally using Kiwi.
OpenSUSE hopes to emulate the success of a two-men project, Linux Mint (maybe more than two people in practice). This is a sad testament to the weakness of OpenSUSE/SUSE, which was a leading distribution because Novell signed that treasonous deal with Microsoft. Not so long ago OpenSUSE suffered repeated downtimes and now it is getting new certificates, presumably for unrelated reasons.
“SUSE has become a mess that GNU/Linux does not need.”The other day we found in YouTube this new video which says: “Not all Open Source Software is free, and not all free software is open source. Open Sourcing Software can be done not just for community, but for security or integration. A sure way to make your software well documented is to provide the source code so that those integrating with your system can see the limitations in the code itself. SUSE Linux from Novell is one such product.”
Like we said before, SUSE is weird when it comes to access to code. Novell hides it or makes it hard to access. If one wants to fork “Microsoft Linux”, e.g. to make a taxless SUSE, there are technical barriers to it, imposed by Novell for years.
SUSE has become a mess that GNU/Linux does not need. Its main purpose now it to replace RHEL with Microsoft tax and more Microsoft APIs. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
02.01.12
Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Novell at 11:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The Microsoft-funded SUSE will no longer pay Greg K-H’s wage, the Linux Foundation will
THE BEST known SUSE developer is arguably Greg Kroah-Hartman. He is dissociating himself from Novell/Attachmate/SUSE starting just about now. He won’t be indirectly funded by Microsoft anymore.
What exactly is happening then?
Instead, he will be funded by Linux backers like IBM and Red Hat. To quote a Microsoft booster:
Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of the Linux kernel’s stable branch and the Linux driver project, is leaving his position with SUSE to join the Linux Foundation in a full-time fellowship role. Kroah-Hartman will now have more time to oversee kernel development and work with the Linux community, while leaving aside the responsibility of working for a vendor. (The SUSE Linux project was owned by Novell, and now Attachmate.)
“There were no direct conflicts working for SUSE, as the people there understand how important the individual developer, and their voice, is in the Linux community,” Kroah-Hartman told Ars this week in an e-mail interview. “But, working in a vendor-neutral environment like the Linux Foundation allows me to spend a larger amount of time interacting with other companies and vendors, as well as helping Linux out in environments that were not necessarily the focus of my previous employer.”
He was one of the main people behind OpenSUSE’s creation. This distribution lost its way. All they have to talk about now is wallpapers:
On a related note, Silva also divulged the wallpaper for openSUSE 12.2. Very much in character of most openSUSE default backgrounds, it’s an attractive, tasteful, and professional choice. Marcus Moeller’s “”Lightray” earned the honor by receiving the most votes in a recent opinion poll.
When OpenSUSE runs polls there are hardly any participants. SUSE will most likely be forgotten in several years. Many of its key developers have already moved on (we covered the departures of selected few). Now they lose the association with Greg Kroah-Hartman — one that they used to take pride in. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
01.25.12
Posted in Dell, Microsoft, Novell, SLES/SLED at 10:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft has gotten Linux by the balls
Summary: How Dell is promoting Microsoft patent tax on GNU/Linux and how Tuxera makes Linux more Windows-like (with Microsoft’s limitations and patent tax, too)
DELL is said to be taking it up a notch with Microsoft Linux, shortly after another Dell and VMware announcement. This is troubling because Dell is promoting Microsoft tax on GNU/Linux by doing this.
Meanwhile, another taxer of Linux, Tuxera, brings out more Trojan horses:
Most distributions use the Tuxera community program for NTFS support; the driver in the Linux kernel has not been actively worked on for some time now. NTFS-3G and Ntfsprogs, originally separate projects, were combined last year.
Well, Tuxera in the kernel would be a problem for the same reason Novell was. What Novell did was put Microsoft hooks inside Linux, thus promoting the dependence of Linux on Microsoft (e.g. Hyper-V). Surely enough, the work of Novell will then be propagated to other vendors of Linux, so Microsoft uses companies like Novell and Tuxera to carry out Microsoft’s dirty work, in exchange for money. It’s about bringing Linux closer to the Microsoft environment, not Linux environments. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
01.21.12
Posted in Novell, OpenSUSE, SLES/SLED at 11:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A roundup of SUSE news and OpenSUSE in particular
SUSE is a project/product that Microsoft uses to tax GNU/Linux. It recently got a boost from a VMware/Dell deal, as we covered some days ago.
The “community” side of it shut down due to problems and later in protest (just the other day). It’s about SOPA. There is also ongoing maintenance:
It’s now the beginning of a new year (happy 2012 everybody!) and I’m writing about some changes that happened at the end of the last year and the period right after the openSUSE 12.1 release. Especially Coolo has used this to do a big cleaning up of our factory distribution touching most of openSUSE’s 4000+ source packages this way.
There are some new graphics from Andres [1, 2, 3] and packaging of new stuff, but then again we also find removals (discontinuing support for 32-bit Xen host in openSUSE12.1). The project is not as prominent as it used to be, so there is generally little activity there. The community manager will be at FOSDEM based on this post:
Oh, and yes, I plan to be at FOSDEM. And so should you – all your friends will be there!
Also about FOSDEM from another member of the project:
Our stand is going to be on the Ground Floor of Building K from 9am on Saturday 4th February till 6pm on Sunday 5th February
SUSE folks hope for Google funding:
I really hope most of the students will stay around and continue the amazing work they do if not openSUSE in FLOSS generally.
Michal Hrušecký writes about OpenStack in a few posts and also mentions MySQL in OpenSUSE. There is a new derivative of version 12.1 out and current usage of OpenSUSE is assessed by a member. Back in the old days (around SuSE 8.1, the distribution came with some neat Web development tools. Wolfgang writes about one of them:
I’m not a web designer really but I happen to be kind of responsible for packaging two web authoring applications in openSUSE which are SeaMonkey’s Composer and KompoZer. While the SeaMonkey integrated editor is somewhat limited (AFAIK) KompoZer (which was forked from Nvu at some point) has more advanced features. But KompoZer development seems to be pretty slow and it misses quite some of the new web stuff which is around nowadays. In addition the current version is BETA for quite some time now and seems to have a major issue in openSUSE 11.4 and 12.1.
last but not least, Novell is targeting Macs now, not GNU/Linux. To quote its latest announcement:
Novell Kanaka for Mac helps IT organizations eliminate manual work-arounds to integrate their Mac users. The plug-in uses native Mac* AFP protocol support making it the most comprehensive and advanced cross-platform server for mixed Windows*, Linux* and Mac clients.
Novell is not focused on what it said it would focus on. It’s just more proprietary software. So to those who wonder what happened to Novell, we’re keeping abreast and reporting. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
01.18.12
Posted in Google, Novell at 2:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News about Novell’s mail and what it is doing to/for Microsoft
News about Novell is scarce, but occasionally we find interesting stuff. Microsoft Skype gets conjoined with Novell Groupwise after work from SkyPRO (worked with Novell before).
There is a retreat away from Groupwise (many move to Microsoft), but justified fear of Fog Computing keeps some existing clients with Groupwise (for now). The LAPD story is being used as ammunition in other contexts, like the article “Spanish Bank Boosts Cloud Software Prospects”. There are statements there like “CIOs still think twice before betting too heavily on cloud computing. In December 2011, for example, the Los Angeles Police Department scaled back its cloud computing agreement with Google, citing security concerns. It is shifting back to a more traditional email service from Novell, which will run on LAPD servers.”
This Groupwise-related story still appears in some venues/outlets [1, 2, 3] that state stuff like:
Consider that Google jsut lost 13,000 out of the 30,000 seats for its Los Angeles contract because the Los Angeles Police Department chose to remain on Novell GroupWise, citing security issues with Google’s cloud computing model.
As we explained before, proprietary Groupwise is not secure either, so it’s just a talking point which would be hard to defend. The same goes for privacy. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »
