01.01.12
Posted in Novell, OpenSUSE at 11:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A new year’s post about the part of Novell which is not FOSS-hostile or parasitical
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. █
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12.28.11
Posted in Novell at 3:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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. █
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12.27.11
Posted in Mail, Novell at 5:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Novell’s portfolio fails to survive
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. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Novell, OpenSUSE at 4:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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. █
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Posted in Novell at 4:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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. █
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12.26.11
Posted in Novell, OpenSUSE, SLES/SLED at 5:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
More mass hypnosis
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”
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Novell, Patents at 4:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A few items of interest covering the legal situation Android is in and what led to it
THE news is aflood with patent news because the IT sector is becoming less about products and more about extortion or litigation.
Bloomberg is phasing into the mainstream the “Intellectual Property” nonsense whenever it writes on the subject of patents, even when it covers the SCOracle case that affects Linux and seemingly lasts forever (like the SCO case).
The Microsoft booster Jon Brodkin is trolling Android again, but he points out (by quoting) that “The point of these lawsuits is to raise the price of Android so that it is no longer able to compete…”
This is what Microsoft has been trying to do. We said this back in 2006 (in relation to GNU/Linux).
Another article says:
Drummond adds that Google’s rivals have banded together to acquire patents held by firms like Nortel and Novell “to make sure Google didn’t get them… Our competitors want to impose a ‘tax’ for these dubious patents that makes Android devices more expensive for consumers. They want to make it harder for manufacturers to sell Android devices. Instead of competing by building new features or devices, they are fighting through litigation.”
Here is another quote:
The whole “land grab” may have been set off in last year’s fourth quarter when networking pioneer Novell, at one point headed by Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, auctioned itself to Attachmate for $2.2 billion, then sold a batch of 882 patents and other technology IP to Microsoft for $450 million. Attachmate is a vehicle controlled by private equity giants Thoma Bravo and Francisco Partners.
We all have Novell to ‘thank’ for that, don’t we? Microsoft’s legal war on Motorola (see this wiki page and latest post)
is still being covered in the news [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and we also have a wiki page about that. On another occasion we will cover the anti-competitive aspect and make further calls to prosecute Microsoft for racketeering, which is what it is. We will leave the “strong” news from another day, not Boxing Day. █
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12.23.11
Posted in Novell, OpenSUSE at 2:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Systemic error
Summary: An article of interest from Phoronix
THE roundup of December’s Novell news is about to come, but among OpenSUSE posts of all sorts we found this article from Phoronix — an article that got its author berated in the forums (typical Novell bullies). To quote:
OpenSUSE 12.1 introduced support for systemd but it didn’t defenestrate SysVinit as there are still some dependencies on this older init system. However, there’s a proposal now to completely phase out SysVinit within openSUSE and it’s been met by some mixed views.
We wrote about systemd in OpenSUSE a few weeks/months ago. █
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