Summary: Microsoft’s Linux internment and Microsoft Linux (SUSE) in the news; a little bit about GroupWise too

MICROSOFT has been creating its own internment pen for GNU/Linux users and it is looking to hire a mole to handle operations and lure some innocent sheep in.

As Microsoft boosters put it, Microsoft has Red Hat customers in sight. Microsoft already taxes Red Hat Linux (servers) at Amazon and now on its own turf it is trying to take this extortion further. Aiding Microsoft’s efforts we have had SUSE for a while, but fortunately Dell is moving away from that (although not to the right system, feeding Oracle instead). From a new page:

How Dell Migrated from SUSE Linux to Oracle Linux

Switching the underlying operating system on a single server is not trivial. Neither is dealing with the related conversion and compatibility issues. Imagine what’s involved in switching the operating system on thousands of servers spread globally across an enterprise, like Dell just did.

The good news here is that Dell itself won’t pay Microsoft tax (for its own systems), but at the same time Dell is actively promoting Microsoft-taxed Linux for OEMs solution, which troubles us a bit. It’s a signed deal which has the VAR Guy arguing about SUSE Studio:

Dell Servers Embrace SUSE Linux, But SUSE Studio Is Real Story

[...]

No doubt, Dell has relationships with multiple Linux distributions — including SUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Canonical Ubuntu. But SUSE apparently is the “first Linux vendor” in the Dell OEM Technology Partner program.

Sort of makes you wonder: Is something deeper brewing between Dell and SUSE? Hmmm…

This is just another reason to actually avoid Dell, but Joe Brockmeier, the former Novell employee, is promoting this. VAR Guy, who has also been close to Novell over the years, goes ahead and promotes GroupWise, which sane Web sites say nobody cares about anymore (and they are right). To quote:

No One Cares That Novell Has A New Version of GroupWise

Today Novell released its 2012 version of its email software GroupWise, and the announcement was greeted by most with a big yawn. GroupWise? Seems so last century. (Actually, the last updates to the software were for version 8 back in 2008-2010.) According to one analyst, “GroupWise has 10,000 customers and is used by 47 of the 50 US state governments.” It has been a distant third to Exchange and Lotus Notes for a while, and many GroupWise customers have switched over to Google Apps in the past several years.

GroupWise is proprietary and it distracts from Free/Open Source options that work equally well or better. GroupWise — like SUSE — is a solution in search of a problem, much like OpenSUSE when it looks for other people’s work again (trying to ape Linux Mint in this case). SUSE over the past 5+ years has been just a product for Microsoft to tax GNU/Linux through. It lacks technical merit/advantage and the latest release of OpenSUSE — as put in this new review — “was released too early. Period.” Boycott Novell and boycott SUSE. █

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: Timely reminder that analysts, journalists and PR agents are interchangeable and serve a similar function, including promotion of Microsoft Linux (SUSE)

SEVERAL weeks ago we noted that SUSE/Attachmate had hired a PR agency for some spin and intervention with the media.

Yesterday we saw an Attachmate employee publishing an article as though it’s unbiased journalism but we also found out that an IDG “journalist” relocated to the firm that services Attachmate. To quote:

BENCH PR has appointed Lisa Banks, ex IDG journalist, to work on the agency’s growing list of IT clients. She has been appointed to the position of senior consultant.

Banks was a journalist at IDG Communications until December 2011, writing for CIO, ComputerWorld and TechWorld. She will work from BENCH PR’s new Adelaide office.

Journalism and PR are similar industries in the sense that they usually sell influence and only pretend to be objective. IDG is an example of it because it gets bribed through advertising and IDC contracts.

SUSE coverage is in part artificial, resulting from pressure from PR agencies. We too get contacted by PR people sometimes, but we pay them no attention. As another new bit of background:

Attachmate plots new future for Novell
Attachmate Corp.’s purchase of Novell Inc. was finalized on April 27 of this year. Attachmate aimed to breathe new life into Novell’s franchises and assured partners and current users of Novell products that they would receive their continued support.

SUSE was separated structurally, but it still controlled by Attachmate and the Bench PR contact with Attachmate explicitly covers SUSE (we showed this before). Whenever reading about SUSE in the corporate press, bear in mind it’s possibly fake and paid for. █

WHENEVER Microsoft becomes the loser, it then tries extremely hard to embrace (and extend) the winner. There are many examples of this throughout the recent history of computers (Java and the Web, to name just a couple).

OpenSUSE/SUSE is an example of Microsoft’s embrace of GNU/Linux — an embrace so detrimental that we called for a Novell boycott over 5 years ago. While there are harmless/benign elements in it, the most damaging element of this embrace and extend/control trick is patent tax. There are some other players that help Microsoft approach a position of control inside FOSS (this is a new press release). To quote, “OpenLogic aggregated data on customers purchasing support contracts from OpenLogic for each project, as well as projects that users deployed through OpenLogic CloudSwing, an open PaaS platform.”

OpenLogic is run by former Microsoft management, so its announcements should be taken with a grain of salt. Perhaps the biggest bit of Linux news as of late was another Microsoft “embrace” of Linux. SJVN is not really reporting what this means to GNU/Linux vendors and what Microsoft is trying to achieve here. Taxing Linux through Microsoft Azure might be the idea:

Here’s the reality: Microsoft is preparing to enable Linux to run on Windows Azure. But it doesn’t sound like Microsoft will officially offer “support” for Linux on Windows Azure. That’s where SUSE could potentially be an ideal Microsoft partner.

Microsoft and SUSE have a longstanding Windows-Linux integration relationship. Some conspiracy theorists in the open source market dismiss the Microsoft-SUSE relationship as harmful. But I think channel partners and CIOs have genuinely benefited from the Microsoft-SUSE work.

Microsoft might try to claim that SUSE “works best” with Windows and regardless of the distribution Microsoft will charge patent toll. Embrace and extend:

Despite the IT cognoscenti’s hankering to variously deride and dismiss Microsoft’s efforts into open source over the years, the company has (at times) produced some tangible advancements in the open computing arena – such as those seen during the Microsoft and Novell interoperability years, to name but one example.

That was a patent deal, allowing Microsoft to tax GNU/Linux indirectly, through Novell, which is dead now despite the continued Novelldemo uploads [1, 2]. SUSE is like a department of Microsoft now.

We can always hope that OpenSUSE volunteers will find other distributions to contribute to, but for the time being there are still volunteers there. Not many, but there it goes:

After the openSUSE 2011 Conference, we run a survey to gather feedback so that we can improve for the next conference. The overall feedback was very positive. Thanks a lot to the 134 people that participated in the survey!

134 people? That’s almost abysmal. SUSE loses in a major way and this must be bad news to Microsoft. SUSE is the last distribution that Microsoft has got left under its control. Let’s not give Microsoft the “embrace” it craves for the infamous “extinguish” phase. █

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”

Summary: Why SUSE should be avoided, not just for helping Microsoft but also for technical reasons

FIVE years ago SUSE could almost be viewed as a victim of Novell’s decisions. But a few months ago SUSE sold out not via Novell and this is when we called for a boycott of SUSE and not Novell (which no longer existed per se).

Now that the Weekly News posts seem quite vacant (compared to years ago) we are left just seeing some OpenSUSE posts like impressions and various reviews. The score for OpenSUSE is not so high, so it is clearly not a leader. It arguably was the leader before Microsoft turned it into a ‘Microsoft Linux’. As one review summarised it: “I would say that it’s still a good distribution, but it’s not quite as awesome as version 11.4, so I would recommend it, but not as much as version 11.4.”

So it is arguably getting worse. People who speak about DistroWatch rankings for OpenSUSE conceal the fact that the recent release provides a temporary boost.█

Summary: Why SUSE lags behind the competition (in GNU/Linux) as indicated by news

NOVELL has become some historical entity whose news this month is mostly about an old case against Microsoft (here is a very recent video about that). We do not intend to cover this case because it is about the ‘old Novell’ of Noorda et al. It is not the same company that we boycott and the old case is only indirectly relevant to us.

So, Attachmate has this new release of OpenSUSE, which comes with a KDE side or a GNOME focus, depending on one’s preferences. The Fog Computing hype gets used for marketing as well, not just real features that are not mere buzzwords meaning “server”.

According to this, SUSE continues to work according to the plan we wrote about before:

Attachmate’s Suse division is also working on OpenStack software designed for ease of deployment in private clouds.

SUSE is not the best option though. For example, there is no SUSE support from AMD’s new chip:

As for operating system support, it’s helpful to note that the Opteron 6200 16-core chip is actually more like eight dual-core “Bulldozer” chips balled onto a single die. AMD says the 6200 supports all operating systems except Novell SLES 10 and 11,

How sad for Novell/SUSE, which is sponsored by Microsoft to help tax Linux (and still cannot beat RHEL and CentOS). They can’t even get fonts right. How come? Some font rendering features were historically disabled due to Apple and Microsoft patents.

In any event, it seems clear that there are no compelling reasons to give OpenSUSE any crown. It is the master of nothing and not a jack of any trades, either. It has Microsoft as its master. Nobody wants that, except perhaps close Microsoft partners like SAP. █

Summary: Some bits and pieces about SUSE, which is Microsoft’s “approved” and recommended distribution of GNU/Linux (complete with Microsoft tax)

SUSE is not about Free/open source software. Increasingly, SUSE is about Fog Computing (more suitable description for ‘cloud’) and many recent articles support this vision of the distribution, including one that says:

SuSE has released an early development snapshot of its OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution.

SuSE Cloud is a new appliance configured to run Diablo, the latest version of the open source cloud organisation’s operating system (OS).

The Attachmate division also said its IaaS was hypervisor agnostic and OS neutral, so customers and partners can build, deploy and manage both private and public cloud infrastructure quickly and easily when it made available sometime next year.

As IDG put it, “earlier this week Attachmate’s Suse announced plans to make software for OpenStack private clouds. Suse Cloud, which won’t be available for at least nine months, will be based on the latest version of OpenStack, called Diablo.”

Zonker's spin of this has made the news in some other sites that repeated similar points and volunteer work is still sought by the company which is partly funded by Microsoft to help put a Microsoft tax on Linux. All this promotion and calls for participation even with parties are merely a vacuum. On the “open” side, OpenSUSE has not actually done much and Studio has been fairly quiet too, with only few bleeps on the radar ahead of a new release of OpenSUSE (to almost align with Fedora’s release).

Although it comes with KDE by default (ish), other flavours exist, but there is nothing in OpenSUSE which users cannot get elsewhere. With near final builds in the making we kindly remind people that those installing it or preparing applications for the release (bar packaging perils) are either employees or people whom these employees exploit for the betterment of “Microsoft Linux”.

Last week I updated the libvirt package for openSUSE12.1 RC1 / Factory to version 0.9.6. The package was also submitted for SLE11 SP2 Beta8.

One noteworthy change is this: “openSuse 12.1 will be running Linux kernel 3.1 and it is expected that openSuse 12.1 will be the first to ship Google’s new programming language Go. openSuse 12.1 has overhauled the boot procedure introducing systemd and Grub2.”

The OBS source repo has been relocated:

The OBS git repos have been moved to github.com…

Michal Hrušecký writes about help it, but as member of staff one is inclined to offer unpaid volunteers like those who bring OBS to Fedora:

Both Fedora and openSUSE use quite different packaging tools, and since I was more comfortable with openSUSE Build Service, I’ve opened a small project (home:ketheriel:fedora), added a Fedora 15 repository and kicked off. While the package built pretty much according to what I expected, OBS doesn’t run Fedora rpmlint by default on the end of the packaging process, and I’m not really sure even if that’s possible without tinkering with it for bit.
My first option was to install a Fedora 16 BETA system and check it out from the real thing (I got seduced by Verne’s wallpaper, which fits so well in GNOME3).

There are those who write HOWTOs specific to OpenSUSE and those to whom SUSE vanity is a form of advertisement [1, 2], just like a release party, of which there are a few around the company’s headquarters (thus involvement from paid employees). Some people prepare posters and the project is always looking for money from Google, even this year:

After Google Summer Of Code 2011, openSUSE plans to participate in Google Code-in. It is an excellent opportunity for openSUSE to meet young talents and introduce them to the ways of open source.

SUSE the company cannot rely on volunteers alone, so it hired yet another person to rally the troops:

SUSE, an operating unit of the Attachmate Group, has appointed Hamish Miles as regional sales director for Australia and New Zealand.

The old management of SUSE is out. Not all of it, but a lot of it. Today’s SUSE is not the same SUSE people in Germany came to know and love. In fact, SUSE is hardly about FOSS anymore. It’s about pushing Microsoft tax with Microsoft’s support. █

NOVELL is a mess, but it still serves Microsoft’s interests rather well. Microsoft calls the shot at SUSE and Novell uploads new videos that promote its brand, even though it is deprecated.

When customers get the choice between Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Linux then companies like this one offer a false sort of choice. Back in the days Novell also offered OOXML as a “choice” (symbolic) and look what it’s coming to. In a matter of days we shall post more detailed analysis of Novell/Attachmate/SUSE. █

Summary: Giving the Microsoft-taxed distribution some free help and “community” angle, the SUSE way; fallacies and wrongs

PEOPLE might not like to hear about it, but OpenSUSE is a case of helping the wrong project, unless the project gets forked and made completely independent from SUSE, which is led by Microsoft.

With the collapse of Novell we saw coming into existence several different strands. One is Xamarin, which .NET proponents are championing, but another is SUSE, which is not the same SUSE that Novell bought. The ‘new SUSE’ is sponsored by Microsoft to help Microsoft get its noose around enterprise users of GNU/Linux (those who use Red Hat or Debian for example). Many such users would not be foolish enough to wrap this noose around their neck, so this whole Microsoft patents toll booth (SUSE) gets painted a “community project” with help from employees such as Jos Poortvliet, who asks for free testing of the project (they even call it “OpenAQ” to openwash the thing). Jos writes:

Testing complex software is a crucial part of development. However, in- depth, frequent testing is difficult, time-consuming and boring.

Yes, and SUSE wants volunteers to help the company out by doing this “difficult, time-consuming and boring” task. All that sponsorship from Microsoft is not enough apparently. Here is an article about it which says: “The openSUSE Project has announced the 1.0 release of the unique cross-distribution-capable, fully automated testing framework openQA.”

We realise that there are OpenSUSE fans who even SUSE-ise their cars, write technical articles and edit the Weekly News, but why shave development costs off SUSE? Are $100,000,000 not enough to build a patent trap and joint extortion racket as well as pay some testers? They are not only stabbing GNU/Linux in the back with their patent deal; they also look for suckers in the community who will give away their time helping this. The way they’ll advertise it is something along the lines of “get Linux support from SUSE (Microsoft) with patent peace of mind (Microsoft patent tax) and a (fake) development community.” They can shove those ads alongside search results for Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, etc. That is their well-funded strategy anyway.

Attachmate never cared about Free/open source software. It never even practised it. So why give away any efforts to it? Over in YouTube, there are some new videos about Novell products and also some speeches. The Attachmate-organised BrainShare videos of the keynote and beyond help show the company’s apathy towards volunteers (other videos are still being uploaded [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]). Why help this company? The CEO said nothing about the community in his keynote. █

Summary: Another notable departure and some context

OVER the past year we have covered several important departures of important people from SUSE, including managers. There is no denying that other than massive cash injections from Microsoft (in the form of Linux tax sharing), there is not much going on at SUSE. Its purpose is now to just be the taxman of Linux, at Microsoft's behest (with Microsoft front ends/sites).

So anyway, based on his blog, Biege is leaving the team:

After 12 years I am leaving the SUSE Security-Team… just to support them!

He seems to be moving on to other things, which is fine. Another SUSE developer who recently left became a university professor. █

Summary: Microsoft is behind the site which sells SUSE support, showing more clearly who is running SUSE’s business

A COUPLE of days ago Ryan noticed the details shown at the top. It helps show the dominant party in the SUSE-Microsoft collaboration, which is an attack on Red Hat, Debian, and other GNU/Linux distributions that turn their back to Microsoft.

This whole sham comes from expandedsupport.com, which seems to be more like a taxing station (toll booth) for enterprise GNU/Linux users. MinceR noted: “I wonder who will fall for this one…”whom to buy support for my GNU/Linux installations? let’s see… the company that’s trying to destroy GNU/Linux, that’s the one!”"

Cubezzz replied: “don’t think they are trying to destroy it any more,.. they’re trying to subsume it” (as we warned all along). █

Summary: A quick overview which includes news about companies that willingly pay Microsoft for Linux

PATENT TAX on Linux was conceived a long time ago at Microsoft (see the Halloween Memos for example). But it was Novell which revolutionised the concept by making a consensual deal that helped Microsoft achieve just what it had sought all those years. In later years we saw smaller companies doing the same thing. One of them was Tuxera, which is now polluting GENIVI with its Microsoft patent tax. Well, its announcement characterises this differently:

Tuxera, a provider of Windows and Mac compatible file systems for Android, Linux and other platforms, announced it has become an Associate Member of the GENIVI alliance.

All that Tuxera does is add Microsoft patent tax to Linux-based platforms, just as SUSE provides Microsoft-taxed equivalents/alternatives for platforms such as RHEL. Over at IDG there is a new whitewashing piece going under the headline “new Novell”, which just like “new Microsoft” is an attempt to separate a dubious past from the present and future. Quoting the introduction:

Novell, which was acquired by The Attachmate Group in April, wants to regain its status as an IT icon and will try to do so by focusing its efforts on its core assets and rebuilding relationships with its huge installed base. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Novell President Bob Flynn and VP of Product Management and Marketing Eric Varness for a briefing on their rebuilding plans.

So far, Attachmate has let a lot of Novell just rot. We gave many examples to show this.

Products were rendered dead, some got neglected to the point of no mention in the press, and the only new Novelldemo videos are about products that are officially deal (it has just come up with 6 more Vibe videos like this one). A separate question is, what will it be with SUSE, which is now sponsored by Microsoft? We’ll touch on that in a separate post.

We realise that Novell is a boring subject to many, especially at this stage. But here in this Web site we cover issues that are important, not issues that necessarily attract traffic. Novell is still a major problem and we stay true to our original goals. █

Summary: More evidence of inaction from Novell’s adopter and inaction from SUSE developers (who cannot offer more than their GNU/Linux counterparts)

Attachmate was recently mentioned for its general neglect of Novell products. We’ve managed to spot an Attachmate sponsorship, their staff writing articles, and even customers that they have, but examples are very few.

In more prominent articles we find some shuffling down under, including this one which mentions Novell:

Attachmate has appointed Ian Graystone as channel sales director for its Novell and NetIQ operations in Australia.

What can be done for Novell at this stage? We see its products declining in the market and one of the only emerging areas — that which is associated with Microsoft-taxed GNU/Linux — is now in Germany (SUSE).

An announcements was sent a short while ago about the beta of OpenSUSE 12.1 and The H wrote:

Following a more than one week delay, the openSUSE project has announced the release of a first beta of version 12.1 of its openSUSE operating system. Originally called Milestone 6, this release is aimed at developers, testers and early adopters, and was reclassified as a beta in September; this was done in order to give it a higher profile in the hope that it would receive more extensive testing. It will be followed by two release candidates (RCs); the final version is scheduled to arrive on 11 November 2011.

More about the GNOME side can be found in Jamie Watson’s detailed analysis which starts as follows:

The next release of openSuSE, 12.1 (code named Asparagus), made it to Beta release over the weekend. I actually wrote about this ten days or so ago, when it should have originally been released, but it was delayed at that time. Now that it is out, in addition to simply mentioning the availability, I decided to have a quick look at their Gnome distribution, which is now using Gnome 3. The default desktop is the same as Gnome 3 under Fedora…

So why not use Fedora then? Red Hat is not in the pocket of Microsoft, unlike SUSE. Back in the days, before Novell signed that treasonous deal with Microsoft, SUSE had actually innovated. It made 3-D desktop effects before Vista was even available and it also made some new menus that exist to this date (e.g. SLAB). Back then there was actually a reason to choose SUSE, as I did too.

We are doing to research and write more about Novell in the weekend. █

Summary: The role of SUSE, its “community”, and a new case study of SLES “Linux tax” at SAP

“MICROSOFT Linux” (also known as SUSE, which is partly funded by Microsoft by the way) is one of the biggest problems GNU/Linux has got on the server side at the moment. It’s mostly about SLES, as SLED is hardly relevant anymore. Microsoft basically takes part of the revenue made by putting SLES in the datacentre, which is exactly why Microsoft backs SUSE financially. It’s about combating distributions that do not pay Microsoft a penny, notably Red Hat/CentOS and Debian GNU/Linux.

SUSE organises an event for employees and volunteers, hoping to attract the latter using the “OpenSUSE” alter ego. To quote the latter article: “At the openSUSE Conference, we talked to the makers of openSUSE about the new developments for SUSE and for the community distribution.”

“Community” is code word for unpaid staff in this case. Microsoft is among those who profit from the work of this “community”.

The more major news this week is the announcement from SAP that it will carry on paying Microsoft a tax for using GNU/Linux. There is even a press release about it and this spin says:

“Our partnerships with SAP and IBM have enabled thousands of customers to gain from the exciting benefits SUSE Linux has to offer, including decreased operating costs and improved performance,” said Michael Miller, vice president of global marketing and alliances…

Shame on IBM for still allowing Microsoft to make money from GNU/Linux. Then again, IBM is not against software patents and it helped SUSE be acquired by Novell almost a decade ago. This whole thing is worth mentioning especially because only days earlier it was stressed that SAP supports Red Hat. When will SAP actually make Red Hat its platform of choice and stop choosing to pay Microsoft for something which is free? Some Microsoft allies like SAP actually want to do this. That’s where SUSE comes in. █

Summary: Small update on Novell, Attachmate, SUSE, and Xamarin

OUR “Boycott Novell” initiative was a true success and right now we are starting to track quite closely the actions of Attachmate, which officially bought Novell a few months ago. Amid the sale there was separation that put SUSE aside, later to become Microsoft sponsored. It also put Xamarin, which keeps pushing Microsoft development tools aside entirely. Attachmate later gave its blessings to Xamarin (along with so-called ‘IP’), but it still owns the “OpenSUSE” trademark and Microsoft has not promised not to sue Xamarin clients or Xamarin itself. The whole thing is a tad dodgy and Attachmate also owns UNIX, which can complicate things further. Here is a new report about Attachmate trying to approach Novell partners in Sydney. From SUSE we have a not-so-imminent release and a pizza party (Microsoft’a pizza? They help fund SUSE) preceding the conference.

,

Our position on the subject is still the same. Novell, Attachmate, SUSE and Xamarin are still more like tentacles of Microsoft. They ought to be avoided. █

Summary: Matthias Hopf leaves the company formerly recognised as Novell, validating what we have said about the general trend in SUSE

OPENSUSE is trying to bury bad news. Key people from the board speak about the conference and impending releases such as OpenSUSE 12.1, which is now in milestone 5. Yesterday I spoke to someone who plans to leave OpenSUSE and he is currently checking what to move to. This is not an unusual sight. After SUSE had signed a patent deal with Microsoft and got Microsoft sponsorship, fewer and fewer people can sincerely believe that SUSE was ever dissociated with Novell’s infamous Microsoft deal. why would a supporter of GNU/Linux stick with the Attachmate-led and Microsoft-funded SUSE when there is so much other choice out there? And why work for SUSE when there is a thriving Linux market out there and high demand for Linux skills? Well, Matthias Hopf has reportedly just left SUSE (his blog confirms):

Matthias Hopf, a SUSE developer working on the X11 stack for the past seven years and one of the original xf86-video-radeonhd driver developers, has left the company.

This long-time X developer is leaving two years after SUSE lost another one of its RadeonHD developers, Luc Verhaegen. Luc was laid off with several other developers at the German office in 2009 when Novell was attempting to cut its costs during the global economic crisis. Matthias is leaving SUSE to become a professor of Applied Computer Science at Georg-Simon-Ohm University. Ohm is a university of applied sciences in Nürnberg where he currently resides.

What’s left of Novell are some security patches for proprietary software [1l, 2] (no new releases) as news is very scarce and Novell/Attachmate PR is done for proprietary VMware, not Linux virtualisation. It is sad to see what happened to Novell, but since it signed a deal with Microsoft, this was inevitable. █

THERE IS news this week about SCO’s defeat which Sean Michael Kerner, Pamela Jones and others who are familiar with the case have covered. Well, as noted in Slashdot, Attachmate has reaffirmed its grip over UNIX, which basically means that nothing has changed and the virtual assets remain where they are arguably safer. The coverage from Utah’s press (sometimes pro-SCO) says that SCO lost the copyright case in this age where emphasis is being put on patents in the fight against GNU/Linux and Android.

A federal appeals court has upheld a jury verdict and a lower court ruling in a trial that found Novell Inc. — not The SCO Group — owned the copyrights to the Unix computer software operating system before 1995.

The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the jury’s verdict from last year in a lawsuit filed by SCO in 2004 as part of its broader efforts to sue IBM over alleged use of Unix code as a model for parts of the rival Linux operating system.

The court upheld the verdict against SCO, saying “ample evidence in the record supported the jury’s verdict and Novell’s position.” It also upheld rulings in Novell’s favor by U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart, who presided over the trial.

This is all very nice. However, to lose sight of the fact that Novell is now being used by Attachmate (via SUSE) to pay Microsoft for GNU/Linux regardless of copyrights would not be wise. The main problem has shifted along with Microsoft’s strategy.

The Register joined YouTube on the 9th of May (2011) and it reminds of us those ads disguised as “content” which it did back in the days for Novell and Microsoft A day or so ago it uploaded this video which characteristically spins a patent deal as collaboration. Viewer should beware and see if they can spot the spin. Novell is not the “good guy”. Like in many wars, both sides can be “bad guys”, ass Zinn (a former bombardier) once explained. █

–Steve Jobs

Original photo by Matthew Yohe, modified by Boycott Novell

Summary: The patent assault on GNU/Linux and Android carries on, although one of the chief players, Steve Jobs, is calling it quits amid struggles to block the competition (e.g. tablets with Linux)

“Apple plus Microsoft equals 100% of the desktop computer market. And so, whatever Apple and Microsoft agree to do, it’s a standard,” said Steve Jobs over a decade ago (see the video). Those two companies, Apple and Microsoft, are now collaborating (colluding) in their attacks on Linux. Might the Cook-led Apple be any different? We doubt it, but we can only hope. The MSBBC and pro-Microsoft lobbyists are pushing a distorted version of the story about Apple versus Samsung. For Apple, the decision was somewhat of a defeat, coming to light on the very same day that Steve Jobs decided to step down from his embargo company. If anyone needs proof that Apple is merely a marketing/branding company, it’s the reaction from investors to this man’s departure. Incidentally, since Samsung is on the receiving end of Apple’s thuggish behaviour, it is worth noting that in last night’s phone conversation that I had with OIN’s CEO (we spoke for almost an hour and a half, touching various issues) it turned out that Samsung (and possibly LG) is not paying Microsoft for Linux per se, so a small correction (error caused by Microsoft disinformation) ought to be made. While LG and Samsung are, according to Microsoft, paying Microsoft for Linux, it turns out that Microsoft just grossly exaggerated this for FUD purposes. The patent deals from 2007 were just for FAT patents. We wonder how many more of those “Linux” deals (e.g. Brother) are just phony extortions over some unwanted and arcane file system. In any case, Samsung and LG are not the sellouts Microsoft would have us believe they are. The interesting thing is, Android was beating iPhone around the time of iPhone 3. It seems likely that Android will beat iPad around the release of iPad 3, as well. No wonder Apple is so frantic and aggressive. The antitrust folks should really pay more attention to Apple’s reaction, possibly constituting a cartel.

Looking more closely at Samsung’s case, the prior art argument was being used properly [1, 2]. “Watch them wind around when confronted with truth,” writes Jan Wildeboer separately, regarding this response to Stallman's piece about the "unitary patent". Wildeboer, whose origin country helps a quick interpretation of the Apple-Samsung ruling, has also been trying to counter the FUD which came from pro-Microsoft lobbyist Florian Müller. This lobbyist pushed his FUD into some news sites. Some pro-patents sites are always looking for damning material that helps validate software patents too [1, 2, 3] while a Microsoft apologist continues to daemonise the Google-Motorola deal (this time using China), even a week after it all happened. Apple’s and Microsoft’s crusade for “Linux tax” is intended to make those new open source-based platforms that are so disruptive to them “uneconomic”, to use the word OIN’s CEO repeated a lot. Over in China, where intellectual monopolies are hardly respected, Microsoft is already infiltrating Linux to put Microsoft tax on it, as we explained twice this week. Quoting Sam Dean:

Microsoft will be involved with the deployment of NeoKylin Linux…

Yes, it’s just like another Novell, i.e. the ‘Microsoft Linux’ which Microsoft makes money from at the expense of Debian, Red Hat, and others. This is a point that OIN’s CEO and I seemed to have no disagreements on. Moreover, as he pointed out, there is clearly an attempt by what he labelled “duopolists” and “monopolists” to just remove competitors from the market. Android is their current target, but GNU/Linux on the server is another. We really must fight back on both fronts. One way is to challenge Android FUD and another is to antagonise Novell-like deals. █