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. █

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. █

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. █

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. █

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. █

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. █

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. █

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. █

Summary: A look at the movement of staff that left or was pushed out of Novell, along with other news of interest to Novell watchers

NOVELL’S role in the world is declining and so is the news volume about the company. Nevertheless, we have found some noteworthy items that require documenting.

Novell layoffs are listed as one of the major stories of the year 2011, based on the local press in Utah:

Hundreds of people lost their jobs at Novell. Some of them may have been able to snag one of the 100 or so jobs that opened up at Overstock’s new Provo office, which was announced in January.

A primer about the fate of Yahoo! (destroyed by Microsoft) mentions Novell, which also got destroyed by Microsoft:

Sun, Novell and 3Com all lacked experience in both areas. Sun was a hardware company lead by a software executive who had never done a turn around, Novell was a software company run by a series of hardware executives that hadn’t done turn around. I could argue that Palm failed because it was being run by folks who evidently didn’t even know how to run a company, let alone do a turn around.

Novell and IPX are both virtually dead, but this one new article mention these:

AB: That’s why I mentioned the early days of working with Novell and IPX. Even over a piece of standard copper, in those days, they were sending keep-alives every 15, 20 seconds, which really didn’t work terribly well, but it had suddenly gone to wide-area and had a V.56 modem attached to it.

Schmidt is mentioned in relation to Novell over here:

Prior to joining Google, Schmidt served as chairman and CEO of Novell, and before that, he was the chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems.

Sun too died and its patents are now being used against Android/Linux/Google. It is interesting how Sun’s old CEO gets sued by Sun patents (at Google) and also by Apple, where he used to have a chair.

A man who sold his company to Novell gets mentioned here:

Entrepreneur and venture investor Kanwal Rekhi has many accolades to his credit. After selling his start-up firm Excelan, which manufactured smart Ethernet cards, to Novell, he spearheaded the company before returning 100x to his venture investors.

There is more here. About David Skok we learn that:

Skok joined Matrix from SilverStream Software, which he founded in June 1996. Prior to its July 2002 acquisition by Novell, SilverStream was a public company that had reached a revenue run rate in excess of $100M, with approximately 800 employees and offices in more than 20 countries around the world.

Novell swallowed a lot of companies over the years, only to sell them down at the river. A new CFO of a small company turns out to have just come from Novell to manage new funding:

In December 2010, ClickSquared hired a new CFO in Novell veteran Stephen Henkenmeier, joining ClickSquared from M|C Communications, a medical education provider where he was CFO and executive vice president. Prior to M|C, he was vice president of finance at Novell.

Gavin Struthers from Novell is mentioned here:

Struthers worked in various sales and general management roles across Australia, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and South Africa and served on the management team at Novell in Australia, after moving to the country in 2000. Struthers does have hands-on solution provider experience as he worked for a leading VAR in a sales capacity in his native South Africa.

The former CEO of Novell has a new destination as well, as we mentioned before (he was also mentioned here and here).

Wave Systems Corp. (NASDAQ: WAVX), a leading provider of trusted computing software, today named Robert Frankenberg, 64, to the company’s Board of Directors, increasing Wave’s Board to six members. Mr. Frankenberg’s decades of management experience in the software industry will help guide the company’s business development strategy across key verticals including government, technology, healthcare, financial services, industrial and energy.

Wolfe, whom we also mentioned before, gets mentioned here:

Wolfe is a former president of Novell Americas, an infrastructure software company, and previously worked at IBM. He starts the job Feb. 15 — more than a week after curators are expected to vote on a proposed tuition increase.

Another man with past at Novell is talked about at the Statesman:

Pilot Credentials co-founder Richard Trocino, whose background includes database design at Novell Inc. and Computer Sciences Corp., began developing the pilot software as a contract project for Federal Express in 2001.

And former Novell staff in a new startup venture gets mentioned here. █

Summary: The traitor Novell continues to be granted more patents, which we already know get funnelled to enemies of Linux through shells like CPTN

THE mobile market is further strangled with yet another patent.

According to this, OTI gets a patent monopoly on the following function:

OTI Receives US Patent for Contactless Smart SIM

[...]

This latest patent, entitled “Contactless Smart SIM”, was issued on January 3, 2012, and covers the capabilities necessary to turn existing mobile handsets into Contactless / NFC capable devices through the incorporation of a SIM card and a specifically designed antenna, all while keeping the phone and operating system fully agnostic.

There are also new Novell patents, granted after the company got bought. Here is one:

Information card overlay, patent No. 8,083,135, invented by Andrew A. Hodgkinson of Pleasant Grove, and James M. Norman of Pleasant Grove, assigned to Novell, Inc. of Provo.

Novell is also mentioned in new patent roundups such as [1, 2, 3, 4] (January 4^th to 12^th, behind paywall). The Utah press writes this:

Identity-based network mapping, patent No. 8,091,119, invented by Jeremy Ray Brown of Orem, and Lloyd Leon Burch of Payson, assigned to Novell Inc. of Provo.

So Novell continues to pile these up. As we know, Microsoft and Apple got patents from Novell, so what Novell is doing it is dangerous. █

Summary: Novell’s ZENworks gets some new developments around it

According to few blogs, ZENworks has not been totally neglected and although reports on this are few, they do provide the little information that exists:

Novell, which was acquired by Attachmate in November 2010, has released version 9 of its ZENworks Application Virtualization solution. Here’s a quick list of some of the new features included in version 9, provided by Novell.

Here is the press release that says:

Novell has announced the availability of Novell ZENworks Application Virtualization 9. This latest release leverages a unique approach to application harvesting that enables enterprise IT staff to tap into a library of trusted resources and find the best stored version to build the necessary virtual application dynamically. By harvesting work that has already been done, IT users can scan a target endpoint and quickly build a set of needed virtual applications, saving time and ensuring quality.

So for all we know, ZENworks has not been abandoned yet (despite suspicions), unlike other Novell products that are quietly killed by passiveness. █

Summary: Xamarin and Mono lack presence in the press and lack any notable activity too

A

few years back we wrote a great deal about Mono. But Mono has hardly been visible since Attachmate trashed it and according to this new article:

Since Novell was acquired by Attachmate last year, the Mono project is being backed by a new company called Xamarin, which was founded by Mono founder Miquel de Icaza, who was previously working at Novell. So the Mono project is alive and well, and it is not too late to add it to IBM i. (It has been rumored that IBM ported Mono to run inside PASE, the AIX runtime environment embedded in IBM i operating system. That idea was bottled up and kept in a darkroom never to see the light of day.)

Xamarin is almost nowhere to be seen. Here is a quick roundup of what happened in recent months:

# July – SUSE signs an agreement with Xamarin giving a perpetual license to all Mono related Intellectual property and stewardship of the open source mono project. Xamarin takes over support for existing Enterprise Mono customers and starts selling Mono-based products, including the popular MonoTouch for iOS and Mono for Android.
# Aug – Mono 2.10.3, Xamarin’s first Mono release, comes out with support for Mac OSX Lion, some WCF improvements and GC fixes.
# Oct – Microsoft takes a dip into Mono by building Kinectimals for iOS
# Nov – Sony announces Play Station Suite built on top of Mono. Phalanger 3.0 gets released with support for Mono instead of needing a C++/CLI compiler
# Dec – CXXI brings advanced C++ interoperability to Mono

That is not much for one to have achieved in half a year. We suppose Mono will just die out on its own. █

Summary: Update on the WordPerfect case and remarks on the need to remember what Microsoft did

JUST before Christmas there were some developments related to the WordPerfect case. We covered them in the IRC channel at the time. Basically, even the dangerous charlatan Bill Gates was called in to testify about those competition crimes against Novell. Shortly after hung jury as we covered at one time it was evident that this 'old Novell' case was about to proceed and Groklaw has this update:

As promised Microsoft has now filed its renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law [PDF; Text] in the Novell case. Nothing terribly surprising here, and we don’t know what arguments Microsoft will set forth to support this motion, although Microsoft renews its arguments set forth in its original motion from November 17.

[...]

Given that the only thing the jury was undecided about was the degree of damage to Novell, are we to conclude that the jury was, in fact, unreasonable in all of its other findings? That seems a bit rich. On the other hand, judges have been known to override juries before, and what a reasonable jury would have done is the basis for a judgment as a matter of law. In this case, however, it would seem that, if the Judge Motz thought Novell had failed to prove its case as Microsoft suggests, he would have never allowed the matter to go to the jury in the first place.

This action by Microsoft is likely simply a matter of protecting its right of appeal and attempting to strengthen its hand in any settlement discussions with Novell. We will await Microsoft’s brief, which is due February 3.

WP is virtually dead and also its employees die if this news is something to judge by (WP/Corel is an old company). Novell too is pretty much dead and to quote:

Fluent in several languages, he used this aptitude working for the LDS Church, WordPerfect, and Novell and pursuing his passion for genealogy.

The pathway of Microsoft’s road of destruction. Doc Searls writes about another former Novell employee who died:

I got to know Judith Burton when she was still Judith Clarke and Senior VP Corporate Marketing for Novell, in 1987. Novell had just bought a company called CXI, which had been a client of Hodskins Simone & Searls, the Palo Alto advertising agency in which I was a partner. By that time HS&S had come to specialize in communications technology clients, and the chance to do something with Novell as well seemed moe than opportune, especially since it was clear that Novell was smarter about comms than just about anybody at that time.

Novell was outsmarted by a company that broke the law in order to get its way and later sneak its way out of justice. Microsoft’s attempt to just assassinate competitors in illegal way continues to this date and we should learn from the past. One day there might be nobody left to tell these stories first-hand; instead, Gates’ PR/reputation laundering operations will continue to rewrite history (including the case against Microsoft, as covered so poorly in the press last month). █

Summary: OpenSUSE is still being neglected, whereas the product it is used to promote (Microsoft Linux/Ballnux) gets promoted by former Microsoft executives who run VMware

THE OPENSUSE project is a PR sidekick of Microsoft Linux, which is one of the few distributions that Microsoft endorses (for they pay Microsoft a patent fee).

According to numerous reports, the download servers are down and the OpenSUSE site itself acknowledges this:

The SAN array of the backend server server seems to have lost 3 hard disk at once now.

That means the array with the built RPMs is broken atm. We are currently checking and replacing from backups – but since not all binary parts of the projects are in backup it means that we will need to rebuild some of them afterwards. This will take time until Monday, 2012-01-16.

That’s today. Well, previously when OpenSUSE had server issues it sought help from volunteers or donations/sponsors rather than Novell. This just comes to show how much the company cares about this PR front; letting it be down for such a long duration of time is truly a sign. Had it been SUSE (Microsoft Linux), things would be brought back up promptly (and also properly backed up with redundancy). Here we find another new article about the Microsoft Linux push that we mentioned the other day.

One news article says:

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Now On Dell Cloud With VMware vCloud DC Service

SUSE has announced that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the first Linux distribution for Dell’s new VMware software-based cloud offering, Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Service. SUSE Linux Enterprise offers the broadest application portfolio, as well as optimisation with the VMware cloud infrastructure suite. Now, Dell customers can efficiently run a wide range of ISV applications, on demand with maximum performance, while receiving streamlined support from Dell and SUSE across the Dell public and private cloud offerings.

Here is another take which goes like this: “The new Dell Cloud Datacenter Service has embraced SUSE as its first Linux platform. The hidden twist: The Dell-SUSE announcement is likely built on the SUSE-VMware relationship, which seeks to counter Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.”

As we showed in previous posts, Microsoft veterans run VMware and the monopolist seeks to hijack the competition wherever it may be, knowing that the days of Windows may be numbered. As one person put it the other day:

Not that this means Microsoft is going away. It just means they will become steadily less relevant, and steadily less required. Because people will want to work, and play, with handhelds and tablets, and they won’t put up with applications that require a desktop-with-Windows. And that’s good news.

Microsoft is busy trying to hijack or tax those who win in today’s market. The solution is to boycott those who serve as proxies of Microsoft. █

THE 'old Novell' keeps the lawsuit against Microsoft, which according to an update from Groklaw is not going to settle.

In a later post, Pamela Jones clarifies that:

Last we looked, Microsoft was breathing fire from its nose, telling the judge in the trial of the Novell antitrust complaint against it regarding WordPerfect and QuattroPro that it planned to renew its motion to dismiss as a matter of law by January 13th. This was right after the trial ended in a hung jury, but a jury made up of 12 people, all of whom indicated they thought Microsoft had behaved badly and one, or perhaps more, who couldn’t agree about damages. That letter made Microsoft sound confident about a second trial outcome. Or delusional. Take your pick.

When it comes to this case, we are on the side of old Novell of course. it is not the same Novell which Ron Hovsepian was running (into the ground). There is an innocent side here and it is not the side which conspired with Microsoft. Over at the OpenSUSE Web site we find this favourable new review of OpenSUSE and OpenSUSE won in a new comparison with Fedora, only to be further praises around Xmas time (‘OpenSUSE 12.1 a “Great Release”‘)

With some HOWTOs about this distro and even some new Xmas videos surfacing about it, we cannot really say anything negative at this time. Novell has been reasonably quiet and although some people struggle with OpenSUSE, quite a few seem to be happy with it now. To quote: “Installation takes 15 minutes or less, and then prompts you to either reboot or continue testing. You’re done!” Later on the same reviewer wrote to say that it ultimately did not work quite so well. But in any event, we try to start this year by being polite to the side of Novell which is not so harmful. Tomorrow is another day. This year we plan to put some more emphasis on Apple and its cult of patents. It’s not a new year’s resolution, but since this is the first year that Novell does not exist, we must refocus. █

Summary: Based on news we can find, Attachmate is doing just about nothing with Novell’s portfolio

NOVELL’S new identity will gradually change and some products will get abandoned altogether. This is the inevitable outcome of the company’s sale.

Attachmate, Novell’s buyer, is looking to expand in India:

Seattle-based Attachmate Corp. bought Novell for USD 2.2 billion. But that isn’t the only reason why the company has been in the limelight for quite sometime.

Based on some other articles that mention this company, there is no real sign of Novell products being part of the plan. As we stressed before, Attachmate is too passive and with the exception of articles like this one we hardly see anything of Novell mentioned. “According to a recent survey,” says the latter, “Risk of Insider Fraud, conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Attachmate Corp., more organizations are paying attention to the risks posed by insiders.”

That’s a Novell thing rebranded “Attachmate”. That’s just about everything we found about this company in the news in the month of December. █

Summary: A roundup of December stories where companies or institutions dump Novell and also make it known

THE tracking of Novell’s demise is made hard by the fact that it went private. It is also made hard by the fact that companies which dump Novell need not make it publicly known. But we do our best to collect anecdotal evidence and this post will supply some.

Here is an article from December that says:

The new Active Directory, which took the place of Novell to store network accounts, became visible this year. Users now log on to campus computers using an Active Directory account and their Netpass username and password.

Here is another one:

The much-maligned Novell GroupWise e-mail program may soon become a thing of Smith’s past: ITS is considering switching to the Google Apps for Education platform. Smith has used GroupWise since September 2000, though over the years many students have expressed dissatisfaction with the program’s organizational system and size limitations.

Here is a massive loss for Novell:

The council is replacing Novell’s Groupwise collaboration tool and Microsoft’s word processing and spreadsheet software for its 3,500 staff, it said in a statement. The switch is expected to save the council £3 million over the next four years.

They are getting rid of GroupWise:

Research by the council’s IT department earlier this year found two viable options for the shift: Microsoft Office 365 and Google. A tender was put out in July to find a company to help migrate the council from its current Novell GroupWise system to one of those two solutions, including supplying licensing, and the winner was the London-based Google reseller Cloudreach.

In LA, after a fuss was made, it turns out that:

Google will pay up to $350,000 per year for those employees to use that system, which is run by Novell, a competitor.

It took a lot of smears against Google to achieve this. Proprietary Groupwise is not necessarily more privacy-respecting than Google. They ought to just deploy Free software, instead. Here is more background information [1, 2], which meets the chagrin of Microsoft boosters. It should not be about security because proprietary software that is native has security problems too. Anyway, it may be too late to reverse this decision. Groupwise might live another day in LA. As for Novell’s other proprietary software, one article says that in provisioning “Key vendors dominating this market space include Oracle Corp., IBM Corp., CA Technologies, and Novell Inc.” How long for? Attachmate is too passive.

Regarding proprietary identity management, Novell is mentioned here. Remember that Attachmate does not promote Novell products, so those pieces of software are in a terminal state right now.

Quoting one last new article:

Licensing revenues are also derived from arrangements in which we enable third party technology, such as solutions from Novell, to be used with our OEM partners’ products.

At Novell, proprietary software is what everything is about, except the incubation known as OpenSUSE. █

Summary: Some bits and pieces about OpenSUSE, which paints as “community” and “open” a rather proprietary product (SLE*) with Microsoft patent tax

OpenSUSE has been fairly quiet in December, with the exception of a new release. Google’s funds for the projects have dried up by now (with exceptions) and some fixes/adaptations are late to arrive, so some people complained that OpenSUSE did not work on their hardware. There are derivatives/flavours like OpenSUSE Edu Li-f-e 12.1 or even this more obscure Live CD:

The third version of the Oyranos Colour Management LiveCD is based on openSUSE-12.1 and will run on x86_64 compatible PC´s. I placed the ISO image yesterday after some preparations on the better accessible SourceForge site for download. The CD project starts into a instantly colour managed desktop, which is unique under Linux.

SUSE is looking for free testers for SLE* and various for-profit products [1, 2] including fog and proprietary. Uwe writes about SUSE Manager and Studio for instance. The OpenSUSE project is just an incubator for Microsoft Linux. Volunteers will sooner or later realise this and for one of them, Sascha, the reports are going PDF-only, which is a step back. Other SUSE enthusiasts who install the distribution may also realise that they can get the same elsewhere, without the Microsoft association. There are site changes ongoing at the incubator. There are hardly any SUSE bloggers left there (not active ones anyway). “Let’s start to get an openSUSE running on the machine,” wrote Danny, who later posted some progress updates [1, 2] that appeared in Planet SUSE. It’s also where Masim’s posts on openSUSE [1, 2, 3] have been appearing. The number of active SUSE bloggers declined over the years and it shows. We just don’t have much to say and show about the project anymore. █

Summary: What Novell’s heads, including the CEO, are up to after the group disbanded

NEWS from December was interesting in the sense that it had many examples of departing Novell staff.

Several years ago we wrote about Masie, who left the company quite shortly (9 months) after it had signed the deal with Microsoft — a deal which he tried to defend. His role at Novell is still mentioned in the news.

Here is the appointment of one who used to work for Novell:

Prior to that, he spent 14 years at Novell after the company acquired Excelan where he was a lead developer for the LANWorkplace product, the first suite of TCP/IP utilities for DOS and Windows.

This goes a very long way back. How about David Bradford?

That’s something Fusion-io had, and even if you go back to 1985, when I joined the executive team at Novell, we had a very broad market we were going after. Every corporation on planet earth needed what Novell sold, and by the same token, I believe every corporation needs what HireVue sells. I’m very excited to be here.

Mark Cuban also used to work for Novell. To quote:

3:08 p.m.- MC says he first learned to program on Ramix (not sure I spelled that right) at Indiana University then started using Basic, C++ and a number of other programming languages and put them to use working for Novell out of college and eventually started MicroSolutions (which he later sold for millions of dollars).

Here is Danny Young from Google speaking about his time at Novell:

He also worked at Novell Inc. and Intel Corp. both in the early ’90s.

The most coverage came from Wolfe. “Wolfe lost his post as president of Novell Americas after the company was bought out.”

Timothy Wolfe got a new job [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19]. Probably a step up for him. To quote one article:

Wolfe is a 20-year executive with IBM IBM Latest from The Business Journals From Intel to Cuomo and the unions, a year of big dealsBob Dutkowsky: Enjoys helping others succeedAustin gets on tech bandwagon, steers it among leaders Follow this company and mostly recently was North American president of software company Novell Novell Latest from The Business Journals DBJ Tech Watch for Tuesday 12/20: News of Google, Oracle, Facebook, Dish and moreMicrosoft: Novell lacks evidence in antitrust caseAnother Microsoft antitrust trial after Utah jury deadlock? Follow this company .

Here is another former Noveller moving on:

Skok joined Matrix from SilverStream Software, which he founded in June 1996. Prior to its July 2002 acquisition by Novell, SilverStream was a public company that had reached a revenue run rate in excess of $100M, with approximately 800 employees and offices in more than 20 countries around the world. His work as a value added investor is best known for helping JBoss take its Open Source business to a successful exit with its sale to Red Hat, and for helping AppIQ, Tabblo and Diligent Technologies, which have all had successful exits, from their inceptions to their acquisitions by HP and IBM.

The CEO of Novell, who was pretty much unemployed for a while (as we noted quite recently) joins IntraLinks as CEO. This did not receive much coverage. “IntraLinks (NYSE: IL), a leading provider of critical information exchange solutions, today announced the appointment of Ronald W. Hovsepian as the company’s new president and chief executive officer effective as of the close of business on December 15, 2011. Mr. Hovsepian was also appointed as a director to the company’s board of directors.”

Here is another page about it. This hardly received any coverage. Another former CEO of Novell finds a new place to work (“Former Novell CEO Robert Frankenberg”). This received more coverage than the Hovsepian appointment. One of the former heads of SUSE becomes CEO as well. “The new company has been set up by the founder of the original ownCloud project, Frank Karlitschek, and Markus Rex, a former SUSE/Novell executive who left Novell at the time of the Attachmate acquisition.” They also received good capital to start with.

Beetar, another manager who worked at Novell, has moved on. She becomes MD at Experian:

Before joining Experian SA, Beetar was country manager for computer software firm Novell. She previously held senior positions at Oracle and MWeb.

More here

As an aside, there is a family dispute of a Novell salesman surfacing on the Web (Pamela vs. Walter Wilson). Incidentally, an obituary was posted this month for Daniel B. Wilson, who had also worked for Novell. Here is the personal story of one with Novell experience:

Dubey established a campus-wide high speed network using fiber optic cables and structured cabling to connect LANs installed in various departments. He designed and developed online computer applications in client server mode using the Oracle 7 database and PowerBuilder 4.0 as a front end tool. He procured installed and commissioned LANs in various departments using Novell Netware 3.11.

So he deployed Novell long before they died. Novell is basically not totally dead. There are events at the Provo Novell Campus, but Novell’s days are numbered. Horace Dediu writes about the legacy of Novell:

It wasn’t until PC servers and server software like that from Novell and networking from 3COM became commonplace that mainframes and minis began to fade.

Novell is now important for legal reasons. To quote this new report:

Cooperation with our international counterparts is at an all-time high on enforcement matters. Virtually every day the division is in close contact with its counterparts all around the world on a variety of matters, including both investigations and policy matters. For example, with waivers from the parties, the division worked closely with the German Federal Cartel Office on an investigation into the acquisition of certain patents and patent applications from Novell by CPTN, marking the first significant merger enforcement cooperation the division had with Germany in twenty years.

Novell, having fought SCO in court, ended up giving Microsoft and Apple anti-Linux ammunition.

Over at Reuters we find out more new information about the purchase of Novell, specifically:

Late last year, Novell was sold to Attachmate Corp, owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo. More recently, Lawson Software Inc was acquired by GGC Software Holdings Inc in a deal spearheaded by banker Michal Katz.

This is also covered in [1, 2, 3]. One last article of interest says:

While it is commonly understood that the existence of network effects should figure prominently in the analysis of entry barriers in many technology-driven markets, this same dynamic may also play a role in antitrust standing analysis. In Novell v. Microsoft Corp., 505 F.3d 302 (4th Cir. 2007), the 4th Circuit affirmed a district court opinion holding that the maker of WordPerfect had antitrust standing to assert claims based on allegations that Microsoft, believing that WordPerfect constituted a middleware threat to its operating system monopoly, damaged the product by withholding interoperability information, coercing original equipment manufacturers into not licensing it, and requiring Novell to use Windows-specific technologies that degraded the performance of the product on other operating systems.

Although Novell was not a ­competitor or consumer in the personal ­computer operating system market, the court found that Microsoft’s anti-competitive conduct had potentially injured Novell by encouraging a network effect that would disadvantage Novell: “Microsoft’s use of its monopoly power in the operating-system market to foreclose the distribution channels for Novell’s applications…would have naturally tended to decrease Novell’s market share and consequently decrease the value of its applications.…This loss of market share could make a competing operating system featuring Novell’s office-productivity applications less attractive to consumers, harming that competing operating system’s potential to surmount the barrier protecting the Windows monopoly.” Id. at 316.

We ought to remember Novell as the company which once competed with Microsoft, then became an ally of Microsoft, and ultimately gave its patents for Microsoft to attack FOSS with. This is a managerial failure at Novell. People who used to work at Novell are still out there in other companies, but they are likely to be harmless there. Still, it is interesting to see what they end up doing. █

Summary: The industry of spin and lies is assigned the task of working on SUSE’s image

The “perception management” industry if contracted by Attachmate to take care of SUSE, which has had some problems recently.

OpenSUSE has been making some changes to the boot process, which led to problems that we covered recently, aside from security ones [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. The boosting of Novell’s SUSE in the news (e.g. in IDG [1, 2]) may be part of the PR campaign and the sole attempt of Attachmate to get involved is apparently this extended PR contract. To quote: “Public relations company Bench PR has extended its contract for The Attachmate Group now to include Attachmate, Novell, NetIQ and SUSE.” It is valuable to know that part of what we hear about SUSE is not organic; it is the fruits of people assigned to changing perceptions around SUSE. The next post will show how it’s sometimes done. █

“[A]fter analysing a five-day working week in the media, across 10 hard-copy papers, ACIJ and Crikey found that nearly 55% of stories analysed were driven by some form of public relations. The Daily Telegraph came out on top of the league ladder with 70% of stories analysed triggered by public relations. The Sydney Morning Herald gets the wooden spoon with (only) 42% PR-driven stories for that week.”

–“Over half your news is spin”