Summary: Ian Pratt and Simon Crosby quit Citrix

THIS site has been critical of Xen since 2007 for all sorts of reasons which we provided evidence to back and support. Well, Microsoft’s ally Citrix was not quite the ideal home for the project based on the fact that Xen’s leaders are quitting:

The founders of Xen.org and the former XenSource- Ian Pratt and Simon Crosby — will leave Citrix to launch a new company called Bromium that will address the “intersection of security and virtulization.”

It doesn’t look like a big rift between Xen.org and Citrix, at least on the surface. Citrix applauded the two men and their new startup on its web site yesterday and wished its former CTOs the best. And Pratt and Crosby are entreprenaurs at heart — their former company, XenSource, was acquired by Citrix in 2007.

This is what happens to companies that get close to Microsoft. KVM is favoured by the Linux Foundation now and among clients I work for it is proving to also be a good replacement for VMware (a company run by former Microsoft managers and owned by a Microsoft ally). █

–Steve Winfield, Microsoft

Summary: How Microsoft’s money and unwatchable influence allow it to subvert laws in foreign jurisdictions while projects like Xen and Apache are paid money to keep quiet on the matter and occasionally defend Microsoft

Earlier this month we explained why Microsoft is the biggest enemy of “Open Source” and warned that IDG has a new spin blog (the “open source” blog in IDG is not pro-”open source”). This blog is currently peddling some hogwash from someone who is working for Citrix, Microsoft’s ally.

The message of appeasement is all too comforting, but Microsoft is not interested in it. Microsoft keeps suing, threatening, and lobbying to make “open source” illegal or impractical to use. A good example of Microsoft’s direct attack on “open source” is currently found in Europe, where Microsoft’s role is described under:

1. European Interoperability Framework (EIF) Corrupted by Microsoft et al, Its Lobbyists
2. Orwellian EIF, Fake Open Source, and Security Implications
3. No Sense of Shame Left at Microsoft
4. Lobbying Leads to Protest — the FFII and the FSFE Rise in Opposition to Subverted EIF
5. IBM and Open Forum Europe Address European Interoperability Framework (EIF) Fiasco
6. EIF Scrutinised, ODF Evolves, and Microsoft’s OOXML “Lies” Lead to Backlash from Danish Standards Committee
7. Complaints About Perverted EIF Continue to Pile Up
8. More Complaints About EIFv2 Abuse and Free Software FUD from General Electric (GE)
9. Patents Roundup: Copyrighted SQL Queries, Microsoft Alliance with Company That Attacks F/OSS with Software Patents, Peer-to-Patent in Australia
10. Microsoft Under Fire: Open Source Software Thematic Group Complains About EIFv2 Subversion, NHS Software Supplier Under Criminal Investigation
11. British MEP Responds to Microsoft Lobby Against EIFv2; Microsoft’s Visible Technologies Infiltrates/Derails Forums Too
12. Patents Roundup: Escalations in Europe, SAP Pretense, CCIA Goes Wrong, and IETF Opens Up
13. Patents Roundup: Several Defeats for Bad Types of Patents, Apple Risks Embargo, and Microsoft Lobbies Europe Intensely
14. Europeans Asked to Stop Microsoft’s Subversion of EIFv2 (European Interoperability Framework Version 2)
15. Former Member of European Parliament Describes Microsoft “Coup in Process” in the European Commission
16. Microsoft’s Battle to Consume — Not Obliterate — Open Source
17. Patents Roundup: David Hammerstein on Microsoft Lobbying in Europe; Harrison Targets Lobbying on Software Patents in New Zealand, Justice Stevens Leaves SCOTUS

The EIFv2 is a fine example not only of Microsoft’s lobbying for software patents (almost all of Microsoft's patents are software patents) but also the company’s unethical activities that involve AstroTurfing, cronyism, and intimidation in other countries. This is a company which is not interested in producing technology; rather, it bends laws, overthrows opposition, and bribes with great pride.

The Free Software Foundation Europe has just updated its Web page which shows what Microsoft did to Europe’s digital agenda through its lobbyists, essentially rendering it useless, discriminatory, and unfair.

EIFv2: Tracking the loss of interoperability

[...]

From our analysis, we can conclude that in key places, the European Commission has taken on board only the comments made by the Business Software Alliance, a lobby group working on behalf of proprietary software vendors. At the same time, comments by groups working in favour of Free Software and Open Standards were neglected, e.g. those made by Open Forum Europe.

As we speak, Microsoft lobbies to legalise software patents in Europe. When it does not sue it intimidates in order to earn “protection money” as it so often gets in the far east (where software patents bear some legitimacy, as in the United States).

It is important to say “United States” and not “America” because south America rightly disregards many unjust monopolies, Mexico is fighting against software patents, and Wayne gives a Canadian’s perspective:

Richard Stallman, one of the truly elite software developers has spoken out many times about the dangers of software patents. Curiously those most in favor of software patents appear to be lawyers from the Patent Bar.

Here is the term “Americans” used loosely in the second part of this essay.

One issue is that Americans think that their patent system is the be all and end all, and that everyone else should imitate them. Curiously a lot of Americans even believe that their Constitution requires that a patent system exist, due to a misreading of it.

One famous case where the system in the United States was shown to be corruptible involved the FDA (Microsoft connection noted), which has a close relationship with Monsanto because employees are shared among the regulators and the regulated company. Here are some “corporate takeover videos” from GM Watch:

One of the greatest concerns about genetic engineering is the way in which it facilitates the corporate takeover of the food supply. These videos show how GM crops are removing the ability of farmers to freely use their own seeds or grow food in the way they choose.

Added below is a popular video which shows what happened to Monsanto in Canada (where it didn’t have enough insiders). This might as well teach us about the role Microsoft entryism has played over the years, even in the European Commission (we gave many examples). Things also changed for Xen when Microsoft put its hands on the project, brought it to its back yard, and put Microsoft managers in it. Matt Taibi famously described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”; perhaps Microsoft’s entryism is evidence that it became a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of IT just as Monsanto became a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of agriculture. Unless people emphasise a message of software freedom, Microsoft will continue its takeover of “open source” and suppress Free software, replacing it with software patents and so-called ‘interoperability’ that depends on them. █

Summary: Microsoft’s extension Ignition Partners is putting money and board members inside yet another company that spreads Free software

LAST week we mentioned how former Microsoft executives who became Juniper managers [1, 2, 3] could lead to more services being offered to Microsoft and now we find this press release. For several years we have also argued that XenSource being sold to Citrix would render it irrelevant to Linux and this did actually happen. RHEL 6 won’t even have Xen anymore.

CBR says that “Citrix unveils new version of XenServer” and Microsoft is giving it “full endorsement” [1, 2].

XenClient, says Wasson, will be included in the “next major release” of XenDesktop and was developed not only in conjunction with Intel, but also PC makers Hewlett-Packard and Dell, which will be on hand to endorse XenClient at Synergy. Wasson said that Microsoft has given XenClient its “full endorsement” too.

It is important to remind ourselves how Xen ended up in the arms of Microsoft’s partner of the year (2008). We previously showed the role played by former Microsoft executives from Ignition Partners and now we find that the same arm is going after a Ruby company, which might in turn be tilted in favour of Windows Server.

Ex-Microsoft power pair puff Ruby cloud

Ruby cloud behemoth Heroku has sucked in some heavyweight power courtesy of two influential ex-Microsofties.

On Monday, Heroku announced that it’s been given $10m in VC funding, and the round is led by Ignition partners, home to Brad Silverberg – who established many of the Microsoft products you now take for granted – and Microsoft’s former chief information officer and chief financial officer John Connors. As part of the cash deal, Connors has joined Heroku’s board.

Heroku is home to 60,000 Ruby applications and it’s used by developers of all sizes, including giants like US consumer electronics retailer Best Buy. The company claims 1,500 applications are being added to its cloud each week.

Microsoft already has IronRuby [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14] and we know extremely well Silverberg's participation in many of Microsoft's illegal activities because we have possession of evidence. Heroku now has Microsoft’s former CFO inside the board. It’s part of the deal. Why would former Microsoft thugs be interested in a company which is home to 60,000 Ruby applications? Judging by what they did to Xen, there is reason for distrust. See our previous analysis of Ignition Partners. It’s just loads of Microsoft veterans and they can use money to promote Microsoft’s agenda. █

THIS is the last “Novell News Summary”; the delivery format is about to change for the first time in years. Today we’ll address several areas in turn.

Pulse

Pulse enjoyed some video promotion in Brainshare 2010 — promotion that has just been uploaded again because it’s a nice video (someone has also uploaded old Novell adverts [1, 2, 3]). Pulse has pretty much been forgotten about, perhaps except for this one sentence in an article about Wave.

Novell are working on Pulse, a collaboration tool that used to be separate, but after we announced Wave they started working to allow compatibility across product boundaries.

Novell is betting on piggybacking Google. It’s absent from the mainstream media for the time being.

SCO

Novell’s victory against SCO was covered in Linux News Log a few weeks late. The hearing about SCO's Java patent took place some days ago; here is what Groklaw wrote in advance:

The SCO bankruptcy hearing on the sale of the Java patent will be on April 20. That’s this proposed sale to Liberty Lane for $100,000, and that’s an LLC affiliated with Allied Security Trust, the anti-patent-trolls company, if you’ve dropped a stitch and can’t keep up as SCO’s assets get sold off bit by bit. If anyone else has bid, other than Liberty Lane, then there would be an auction on the 19th, but SCO told the court they don’t expect that to happen.

This Java patent was not a done deal yet. Here is another update from Groklaw which talks about the patent being sold.

Bankruptcy court gets more and more weird. Today’s scheduled hearing in SCO’s bankruptcy was cancelled at the last minute. No one told the U.S. Trustee’s Office, I gather, since our reporter showed up and so did that office’s representative. Meanwhile, the order approving the sale of the patent was approved and signed by the judge.

Groklaw then explains “What the Judge Still Has to Decide in SCO v. Novell”

We know that the jury in SCO v. Novell decided that SCO didn’t get the copyrights in 1995 under the APA or by Amendment 2 or any fusion thereof. That killed SCO’s slander of title claim as well. But that isn’t the end. There were some issues the parties agreed before the trial which would be decided by Judge Ted Stewart. That has yet to happen.

The most important remaining issue is SCO’s claim for specific performance. SCO’s alternative claim, should it fail to win on the copyright issue, was that even if it were decided that it doesn’t get the copyrights to date, under the APA Novell is obligated to turn them over now. I’ve seen some comments wondering if there will be another trial of these issues left for the judge to decide. The answer is no, I don’t think so. It was all tried together. The jury rendered its verdict, and next comes the judge’s. I don’t know of any time frame.

The following day and the day after that:

Novell has filed its Proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law in SCO v. Novell, one of the two documents that the judge has been waiting for prior to reaching his decision on the issues he was to decide after the jury reached its verdict on copyright ownership…

It seems like it never ends. Novell’s stock is still steady ahead of what seems like a takeover. This could certainly disrupt the case against SCO.

Old Products

iPrint adds some drivers and Netware continues to receive support from Arkeia [1, 2]. This was mentioned before; Netware has no real future, but it still has many users.

Virtualisation

Red Hat has just officially dumped Xen (based on a beta of RHEL), but Novell keeps closer to Citrix, as expected.

While The Planet uses KVM running on Ubuntu, IBM adopted the Red Hat-branded version of KVM. Red Hat and KVM seem to have won another endorsement from Novell, which said it will support KVM in version 11 of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

But Novell still supports Xen, of course, and Citrix CTO Simon Crosby writes in his blog that Novell’s support of KVM is to be expected because KVM comes with the mainline Linux kernel.

Here is a lame new video about IWM, which is just a load of jargon and marketing hype for the movement of processes or VMs between servers.

Mail

Novell’s GroupWise is going nowhere special and here is a new rant about Novell Web Access:

• I almost feel bad stating the obvious, but it needs to be said: Let’s switch to Gmail already. In four years, I’ve heard nothing but disdain for Novell Web Access’ micro-sized inboxes and, as one former student and computer whiz told me, “a user interface that’s so counter-intuitive it’s not even funny.” USGA already passed a resolution advocating the switch, and could potentially engage a massive segment of disgruntled students with the proper outreach. Rally the troops, Tony Catalano, and make this one happen. We’re behind you.

GWAVA continues to develop for GroupWise, based on this new press release.

GWAVA is pleased to announce the release of version 1.8 of Retain for GroupWise®. Retain archives GroupWise messages in a secure and accessible format so that restoration is simple. By archiving older messages, data integrity is still maintained while storage costs are significantly decreased. Archiving with Retain protects organizations from costly litigation or liability issues.

GroupWise is mentioned very briefly in a few other new pages [1, 2] and also in this announcement from SKyPRO (mirrored here).

SKyPRO is releasing a public beta version of GWTalk, their Soft Phone Client developed specifically for the Novell GroupWise user communities.

GWTalk is a free soft phone client that integrates with Novell GroupWise. GWTalk connects all users to the GWTalk Network allowing them to make calls and IM each other for free.

SKyPRO was involved with Novell last year [1, 2, 3].

Here is something about the blunder which we mentioned earlier in the week:

Human error is being blamed for the action as the author used the auto-complete function in Novell’s email software to include the journalist’s address, along with those of five Gwent Police officials in the ‘CC’ field of the message.

This is also a security hazard.

Security

A promotional piece from the Indian press presents the words of Naresh Shah, the director of Novell India Development Center. He speaks about fluffy notions such as “cloud computing”.

IWM strategy combines identity and security, systems management, and OS technology to manage workloads more securely and efficiently across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments. Novell places its IWM products into four different categories: build, where it has SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SUSE Studio, SUSE Appliance Toolkit and ZENworks configuration management; secure, where we find Identity and Access Manager, governance and login; manage, consisting of Novell’s acquired PlateSpin management software and more ZENworks; and measure, where it has Novell myCMDBTM and business-service measurement and management tools.

Novell has made very little out of PlateSpin. In fact, PlateSpin executives fled Novell.

People

Former Novell executives are reaching some other companies, with new examples that include:

1. Storage Startup Fusion-io Continues Rapid Pace

Many of those new-wave storage products are called SSDs, for solid-state drives, and are designed to fit in the same slots in the front of servers that house conventional drives. Fusion-io takes a different approach, offering devices that fit inside servers in slots that are typically used for graphics chips. “We get much higher performance,” says David Bradford, the onetime general counsel for software company Novell who was named Fusion-io’s CEO last year.

2. ContentWatch Names SageCreek’s Warner As CEO

According to ContentWatch, Warner replaces Jack Sunderlage, who is leaving the firm after a transition period. Warner was previously VP of Global Sales for Alianza, and also served at Altiris/Symantec and Novell.

3. Liz Carter: The serious businesswoman who would capsize a certain Georgia Democrat

Carter understands it all too well, having risen to a leadership position with Novell at the age of 22, having run her own consulting business for the past decade, and having had to face tough budget and spending decisions on more than one occasion.

Partners

Pan Communications, which we mentioned last week, mentions its relationship with Novell and Novell is also mentioned in coverage and press releases of other companies [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. With the exception of SUSE Studio partners, Novell does not connect with many companies anymore.

Marketing/PR

Novell’s latest marketing message has no real meaning. There are no real announcements to make, either. So Novell just brags about a CRN award in its PR blog and even issues a press release about it [1, 2, 3]. These prizes are easy to just buy and they have little significance, except for on paper. It’s even less reliable (more corruptible) than an analyst’s “recommendation” — any analyst with whom one can sign a contract in exchange for influence. It’s not hard to find press coverage that mostly quotes Novell on the subject. It’s all marketing from channel chiefs who are also CMOs.

A new poster called “Dister” writes/talks about BrainShare and shares videos that we mentioned last week. Other BrainShare videos are being spread, including those preceding the keynote talks [1, 2] (we have already seen these older ones because they were uploaded before). Novell’s PR team then prepares people for BrainShare Amsterdam. It’s coming soon and it will go beyond Utah. █

Utah building

Summary: Further analysis of the response to Mono criticism and the abuse directed against those who dissent against Mono

A COUPLE of days ago we joked about how people who ‘dare’ to criticise Mono and Moonlight are being labeled “conspiracy theorists” (or other such labels). It’s an ad hominem attack.

But let’s look at the facts; we are not suggesting that there is a ‘conspiracy’ (mind the scare quotes); rather, there are centres of influence involving people who may benefit from their belief that Mono is acceptable and that Microsoft is benign. We are talking about journalists like David Worthington, who even this week continues promoting Microsoft inside “Open Source” (like the PR effort mentioned some days ago).

Microsoft and its allies are spinning using the usual people, who are simply supportive of their cause. There is nothing new about Worthington’s coverage on these subjects [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and the latest highly-publicised incident [1, 2, 3], which Bruce Byfield decided to spin along with Worthington and Microsoft MVP de Icaza, is not exactly surprising. There is some history there, as Sam Varghese rightly points out:

Of Mono, apologists, and missing the news for the spin

[...]

But what is extremely interesting about this whole episode is the way that Bruce Byfield, a self-described computer journalist, has gotten involved and tried to make out that there was nothing newsworthy about De Icaza’s comments.

Byfield attempted to turn the focus on the fact that Melton and others had questioned the disappearance of the March 17 article. He lumped a link to my iTWire piece in a portion of his article which had a sub-heading “The Rumor Mill Grinds Coarsely” – though everything reported in my piece was strictly factual – and, for good measure, also took aim at Roy Schestowitz who runs the BoycottNovell website. There is some history between Byfield and Schestowitz.

In other words, Melton, I and Schestowitz comprised the rumour mill. The oracle of truth was apparently Byfield.

[...]

De Icaza begins the March 25 blog post by saying “It seems that David’s article on Windows strategy tax on .NET lacked enough context for my actual quotes in there.” But, as Melton, who, in truth, shows more of an analytical mind than both Byfield and De Icaza combined, points out, De Icaza had already congratulated Worthington on the article, posting a tweet: “@dcworthington I am in whole agreement with you there; Btw I loved the article, good balance.”

Let me echo Melton, who, in a long analysis of the episode, asked: “So did the article lack enough context or was it a good balance?” It surely can’t be both!

Byfield, of course, did not bother about minor contradictions like this. He was on a path to uncover the “The Mono Mystery That Wasn’t” – that’s the headline for his article, which makes it appear to be some kind of fairytale, as indeed it turns out to be.

Basically, Varghese shows that it’s extremely unlikely that the article was removed by accident; it looks more like a cover-up and ‘damage control’. Byfield is attempting to look professional while using words like “conspiracy” to just smear those whom he and his friends do not agree with. That’s just the type of treatment one receives from Mono bullies and Varghese goes further in a newer article by claiming that “Mono apologists drive developers away”.

When Hubert Figuiere, a developer who had lost his job with Novell in the first quarter of 2009, released the note-taking application Gnote on April 1 last year, one doubts that he had any idea about the kind of attacks which would be launched on him by Mono advocates and apologists.

[...]

Figuiere’s sin? Gnote is a port of the note-taking application Tomboy, which is written in Mono and is an official part of the GNOME Desktop. Gnote is a port of the same code in C++/GTK.

Mono, for those who are unaware, is an attempt by Miguel de Icaza, co-founder of the GNOME desktop project and a vice-president at Novell, to create an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET development environment. Mono has attracted a fair share of controversy as many in FOSS circles fear that it may pose patent problems.

Figuiere received abuse from the pushers of Mono. Eventually he left the project at the hands of Fedora where it’s maintained.

As we pointed out a couple of days ago, it is important that people find the courage to speak out against Mono. A lot of influential voices prefer not to be entangled in controversy, even if they know that Mono means trouble. The Source continues to take a careful look at Mono-related issues and a few days ago it also found this interesting new item. It shows what Xen really thinks about “Open Source” after joining Microsoft’s Partner of the Year (2008), Citrix.

This is ultimately another “let’s point out a software problem that applies to both Open and Closed Source and pretend like it only applies to Open Source” bit of misdirection.

It sure seems like a lot of entities in the GNU/Linux world — the Linux Foundation included — move away from Xen (Citrix) and mostly adopt KVM. Microsoft tends to just ruin projects that it touches. █

THIS week was mostly about BrainShare 2010 and Bob Sutor turns out to have given a talk at BrainShare.

On Tuesday morning, March 23, at 10:30 in Salt Lake City, Jean Staten Healy and I will be presenting a talk called “Linux as a Catalyst for a Smarter Planet” at Novell’s BrainShare conference. The talk is coded as SPR201 and will be in room 150 G.

Here are Microsoft boosters belittling Novell in their Windows fan sites which pretend to be news sites. It’s about AD’s birthday.

Pulse

Novell finally issued this press release about the beta version of Pulse.

Novell said it will make Pulse, its enterprise social networking tool, available for beta testing this week.

Apart from the word from Novell (PR message), several other Web sites have covered it [1, 2, 3, 4] and there is also a promotional video.

The following new video is in Russian and the Pulse segment starts almost 4 minutes from the start.

People who attended BrainShare got an account.

At the annual Novell Brainshare user’s conference this week, Novell announced it was providing attendees with a Novell Pulse account and five invitations, which they can use to bring colleagues on board. Pulse is a cloud-based collaboration platform, which we first covered last year in a One on one interview with Ken Muir of Novell.

How does that compare to Google’s Wave? CMSWire decided to ponder and question the viability of this entirely new paradigm that resembles others.

Perhaps Google Wave would’ve gotten more attention if the initial focus was on the enterprise rather than the consumer. Here to test that theory is Novell and their new Wave-like platform called Novell Pulse. It’s social, you can chat with it and collaborate on documents with colleagues, but its focus is on the business side of things.

SAP and Microsoft develop proprietary equivalents and the following post mentions Pulse along with Microsoft.

For on premises, Microsoft promotes Office Communications Server. The next release, slated for sometime in 2010, is filled with social media capabilities. The effort reminds me a bit of Novell Pulse, a corporate social media and collaboration platform that Novell will soon promote to hosting providers.

Here is an audio interview with Ken Muir from Novell, who speaks about the same subject at IDG.

Keith Shaw talks with Ken Muir from Novell about ways IT can help improve real-time collaboration efforts.

More audio from the same site can be found here and it’s about Novell’s fate (affecting the stock). This link from IDG UK lead to an article which was mentioned before.

SCO

The SCO case is long and complex. It would be easy to resolve (dismiss), but SCO gets money to carry on with the smears, which mostly repeat themselves over and over again. Groklaw is the main site that covers this case and some of the latest articles are:

• Week 2, Day 10 of SCO v. Novell – Chris Stone, O’Gara, Maciaszek, Nagle

• APA’s “Included Assets” Did Not List SVR4.2 – Research Project

• SCO vs. Linux: The jury has been informed

The second week in the Salt Lake City jury trial between the SCO Group and Novell about the copyright to Unix has uncovered further surprising details of this never-ending story. First, SCO’s former CEO Darl McBride, who was called as a witness, confirmed that SCO didn’t need the debated copyrights for the development of its family of operating systems, and that the copyrights were only required for the licensing business of the vendor’s SCOSource division. Then the previously unaware jury members were informed that a judge had already delivered a ruling in this matter, but that his decision had been overturned. The trial will go into its third week while, at the same time, Novell’s Brainshare conference will be held in Salt Lake City.

• SCO looks to make a comeback (also in here)

Dogged by ongoing legal costs and courtroom setbacks, the company was forced to declare bankruptcy in 2007. Throughout the bankruptcy process, SCO has said that it would continue to appeal the cases against IBM, Novell and others.

• For the Lawyers, It Was a Working Weekend

• Week 3, Day 11 SCO v. Novell – SCO Rests after Tibbitts, Novell Begins with LaSala

• Novell Motion to Strike Damages Testimony After June 9, 2004 & Reply to Objections to Braham Testimony

• Week 3, Day 12 in SCO v. Novell – Tolonen, Amadia

• The Parties Tweak the Jury Instructions in SCO v. Novell

• Week 3, Day 13 in SCO v. Novell – Jones, Messman, DeFazio, Braham – Updated

Today at the SCO v. Novell trial, Novell called Gregory Jones, and then SCO called Jack Messman as a hostile witness. His deposition was played in part earlier, but this was Mr. Messman testifying live. Then the Michael DeFazio deposition video was played. And then Novell called Tor Braham. Only two more days, and then it goes to the jury.

• Novell Files Motion for Judgment and Motion to Strike – Denied – Updated as text

Novell has filed two motions today, one for a judgment on SCO’s slander of title claim — the promised Rule 50(a) motion — and one to strike testimony inconsistent with the unambiguous contract language.

Novell points out that the only evidence SCO presented regarding malice is testimony by Maureen O’Gara of a conversation with Chris Stone, and no one corroborates her story, first of all, and second, O’Gara admitted she can’t recall exactly what was said in the conversation with Chris Stone. She merely surmised things. And that’s not clear and convincing evidence. No reasonable jury could find personal malice in the picture, so Novell says as a matter of law, judgment should be granted as a matter of law on SCO’s claim for punitive damages.

• SCO, Novell suit goes to jury

The contract between Novell and Santa Cruz contained ambiguous language about the sale of copyrights that is at the center of the dispute being aired before the jury.

• Week 3, Day 14 SCO v. Novell Trial – Braham, Bradford, Musika, and Judge: ‘the End is Nigh’

• Novell Moves for Judgment on Slander; SCO Moves to Limit Closing Argument

NetWare

“Novell drops NetWare support,” says this report which is complemented by another that says: “Novell drops NetWare support: What do millions of users do?”

Novell has announced that general support for NetWare (on physical machines) will end this month. This includes Open Enterprise Server and Open Enterprise Server 2 on NetWare.

Novell has announced that general support for NetWare (on physical machines) will end this month. This includes Open Enterprise Server and Open Enterprise Server 2 on NetWare. Novell, however, is providing extended support for these users through March 2012. Customers continue to receive general support for NetWare 6.5 running as a virtualized operating system under Xen on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). In addition, customers that migrate their NetWare systems to Open Enterprise Server 2 on SLES continue to receive general support. NetWare services include iPrint, iFolder, directory services via eDirectory, and more.

Novell’s cash cows are dying. What’s next then? A sale of the company?

Virtualisation

Is Novell ditching Xen? It seems possible.

The news caused many pundits to proclaim that Novell was taking its first steps toward abandoning Xen altogether. This would be especially odd, since it was only in February that Novell and Citrix announced that they were partnering on virtualization, an extension of a year-od partnership between the two for Xen. The news in February was that Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was certified as a “Perfect Guest” running on Citrix XenServer and both companies will provide joint technical support to customers.

There are some new potential contradictions and from the ‘Microsoft media’ at 1105 Media we learn about special/preferential treatment for Novell. Is Novell moving to KVM? Perhaps only partially at the expense of other options?

With the announcement of the upcoming summer release of Service Pack 1 (SP1), Novell will officially support the KVM virtualisation solution in version 11 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). Support for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine was already included as a “technology preview” in SLES 11, however, with SP1, Novell will offer official support for guest systems including SLES 9 to 11, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, XP and Vista, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 and 5.

Novell’s own hype around intelligent workload management (IWM) carries on:

Novell is so confident of the market for intelligent workload management that it is restructuring its business around the technology. But what exactly does it do and why is it needed?

In December 2009, Novell announced a restructure of its business to facilitate its belief that intelligent workload management (IWM) will play a major role in its future.

IWM might be an unfamiliar term in the world of virtual enterprise management, but Novell believes it is a technology that will help to allay fears about the security of cloud
computing operations.

This is a new product without any success stories that Novell publishes.

Mail

Novell’s GroupWise is being promoted by Novell staff and supported by third parties such as ZyLAB:

Information access technology provider ZyLab (news, site) has just upgraded its email management software so that client companies will be able to archive directly from Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and Novell Groupwise.

GroupWise support is not exclusive in this case.

Here is the press release from MessageSolution which still supports GroupWise (migration) and also a migration away from GroupWise.

Lincoln Property Company, a real estate management firm based in Dallas, Texas, has about 4,000 employees scattered throughout the U.S. CIO Jay Kinney just moved almost 1,000 of them to Google Apps, ditching Novell GroupWise in the process. Kinney said he ran the numbers and Google came out ahead. His users are already spread far and wide, so managing the system remotely was a natural fit.

There is more information about it here.

Here is a new video about mail and Novell.

Management

Based on the recent press release, the following item was issued.

Callidus Software, a provider of sales performance management solutions, has announced that Novell, a provider of infrastructure software solutions, has implemented Callidus Monaco’s objective management solution to develop and manage its management by objectives or MBO programs.

Novell’s PR people have published many guest posts about identity management [1, 2, 3] and later on we’ll show new video commercials.

Security

Apart from a couple of SUSE items [1, 2] there was nothing to see here really.

People & Partners

Masahiro Morimoto, with historical Novell ties, becomes a vice president at Webroot.

Webroot, a leading Internet security provider for the consumer, enterprise and SMB markets, today announced it has appointed Masahiro Morimoto to the new role of vice president, Asia-Japan.

[...]

Morimoto has also established and managed subsidiary operations of several major software companies, including Digital Research (acquired by Novell in 1991), Sony Microsystems (a division of Sony America) and Xerox. In addition, as vice president of Novell, Morimoto developed the company’s system technology for non-conventional Novell business environments including the retail, office-automation market and production-automation markets.

Here are some Novell partners that can be seen as worthy of a mention, at least based on Novell.

Mainline – Data Center specialized partner
Paragon Development Systems – End-User Computing specialized partner
Deloitte – Identity and Security specialized partner
Agilysys – Rising Star partner
Infosys – Rising Star partner

Infosys is an interesting one because of its very strong ties with Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15].

Another new/advanced partner is Compendium Education Center.

Compendium Education Center has been awarded with the status of a „Novell Training Services Partner – Platinum level”.

Mainline also receives honours (to be found here too).

As a leading IBM Premier Business Partner, and the largest System z partner, Mainline has helped more than 150 System z customers install SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell, creating customized virtualization and workload management solutions.

Novell gets mentioned in relation to Mercury Solutions a couple of times [1, 2]. Nothing fascinating or significant here.

Marketing

To coincide with BrainShare, Novell’s own staff has released many advertisements that we put here in no particular order.

Novell Identity Manager Man – Skydive

• Novell Identity Manager Man: Night Club

• Thats Intelligent: Geek vs Geek – Dance Club

• Thats Intelligent: Geek vs Geek – Robot Wars

Novell has also made available some more case studies for proprietary software and a bit of SUSE [1, 2, 3, 4]. That’s all for now. █

Summary: Citrix is promoting if not prioritising Windows Server and so does Amazon, which continues to discriminate against GNU/Linux

Microsoft booster Paul Thurrott writes the article “Microsoft’s Virtualization Jihad” — an article in which he describes an issue that has worried us for quite some time. All along Microsoft has just been buying its way into virtualisation and disrupting many companies in the process. This includes XenSource, which was acquired by Microsoft’s ally Citrix (Novell too plays a role in this).

“All along Microsoft has just been buying its way into virtualisation and disrupting many companies in the process.”According to many articles [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8], Microsoft and Citrix grow even closer. “Microsoft squeezes Citrix into Windows server pack,” says this one report and one blogger asks: “What’s Microsoft’s real reason for killing VECD?”

We are actually made a lot more concerned not by Microsoft’s increased relationship with Citrix but about what goes on at Amazon.

Early this morning, we received an announcement from Amazon the company is launching a pilot for EC2 customers to allow your enterprise organizations to move existing Microsoft Windows Server licenses to Amazon and receive a proper discount for the new EC2 instance.

As we explained last week [1, 2], Amazon grew increasingly hostile towards GNU/Linux, which it sold out to Microsoft [1, 2, 3] after it had hired many former Microsoft employees. Amazon is now encouraging adoption of its Windows servers using “discounts” [1, 2, 3] and one must not forget that Microsoft’s lawyers were first with the news that Amazon will pay Microsoft for Red Hat servers. No “discounts” from Amazon for GNU/Linux? No “opt-out” for “Microsoft tax”?

As a SAAS blogger states in his new headline, “Microsoft really, really, hates the cloud” and Microsoft is trying to marginalise GNU/Linux where it is really successful, using racketeering tactics [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. This is not the behaviour of a software company, whose former employees changed Amazon like they were part of a political movement. █

Summary: Microsoft has issues evolving, its brand is falling down the ranks, its attempts to mimic open source mostly fail (despite media blitz), and Red Hat copes with Microsoft’s attempt to swallow virtualisation

MICROSOFT’S exacerbating financial performance (see analysis of the latest results in [1, 2, 3, 4]) may explain its increased racketeering (last example from yesterday). With ever-decreasing margins, Microsoft must find an alternative business model. So far, Microsoft has failed to mimic Google’s model (Microsoft loses over $2,000,000,000 per year in this area), so it decided to use regulators and lawsuits by proxy to hurt Google. Microsoft did the same thing to GNU/Linux by funding SCO, for example.

Microsoft’s control of the mainstream media usually prevents access to simple facts that are not hard to show and to defend. When some single firm from the UK hailed the Microsoft brand last month, nobody dares to question the data, the methods, and the population questioned. In fact, that single source was quoted extensively outside the UK in order to sell the impression that the Microsoft brand has power.

“When some single firm from the UK hailed the Microsoft brand last month, nobody dares to question the data, the methods, and the population questioned.”CNN/Fortune has just released a list of “The Most Admired Companies in the World”. Apple and Google top the list and Microsoft is not even in it (it is not among the worst brands, either). In any case, it is clear that Microsoft dropped sharply and this agrees with 3-4 similar surveys from 2008. They have all shown that Microsoft’s reputation was declining rapidly.

“Windows breeds fear and ignorance,” said this one blogger a couple of days ago. “And I put the blame squarely on Windows,” he added after explaining an experience with an indoctrinated individual. A few days ago we also cited a post from Jeremy Allison — one where he speaks about his days in Sun Microsystems. Here is an example of a company that was once so gigantic and formidable. Where is it today? It is in Oracle, which some notable people whom we cannot name just yet are about to leave (we received private communication about it).

“Sun Fell Prey to Open-Washing,” says BNET in the headline that continues: “Who’s Next? Microsoft?”

Here is a key part of the argument:

Openwashing is similar to greenwashing, in which a company markets itself as environmentally friendly but is actually faking it. A high tech firm openwashes itself when it makes noises about open software but is really interested in preserving its proprietary offerings and hampering free open systems practices.

So basically, BNET explains that excessive desire for control over developers cost Sun its existence. This agrees with what Jeremy Allison wrote and Bradley Kuhn wrote about that too.

Meanwhile, I’m less optimistic than Jeremy on the future of Oracle. I have paid attention to Oracle’s contributions to btrfs in light of recent events. Amusingly, btfs exists in no small part because ZFS was never licensed correctly and never turned into a truly community-oriented project. While the two projects don’t have identical goals, they are similar enough that it seems unlikely btrfs would exist if Sun had endeavored to become a real FLOSS contributor and shepherd ZFS into Linux upstream using normal Linux community processes. It’s thus strange to think that Oracle controls ZFS, even while it continues to contribute to btrfs, in a normal, upstream way (i.e., collaborating under the terms of GPLv2 with community developers and employees of other companies such as Red Hat, HP, Intel, Novell, and Fujitsu).

The moral of this story is that control over what developers could and could not do is what drove many people away and made Sun history. Microsoft is facing similar problems right now and it tries to ‘embrace’ (in “EEE” sense) the Free/open source arena in order to recapture developers. It’s not quite working.

A reader sent us this pointer to a Microsoft project yesterday. “Pay Microsoft more money to secure insecure Microsoft software” is how our reader described it. He said that “it’s released under an ‘open-source license’, except it only runs on Windows, the monoculture.” To quote from the project’s page: “U-Prove is an innovative cryptographic technology that enables the issuance and presentation of cryptographically protected claims in a manner that provides multi-party security: issuing organizations, users, and relying parties can protect themselves not just against outsider attacks but also against attacks originating from each other…”

If this is an example of “open source” at Microsoft, then it’s more or less a farce. Microsoft’s own ‘news’ site, MSN, has just published some promotion of the “Microsoft-seeded foundation”.

A Microsoft-seeded, open-source organizer picked a Headspring Systems project for its first non-Microsoft sponsored effort.

Yes, Microsoft is organising a bit of a press tour [1, 2] to promote the CodePlex Foundation [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], where Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza is on the board. Here is the ‘Microsoft press’ promoting a .NET obfuscator. That’s the type of stuff Microsoft calls “open source”. It’s all about Windows, .NET, Silver Lie, etc. And how typical it is for CIOL to be pimping (with links) Microsoft’s smears of Free software, under the confusing headline “Open source slowly gaining momentum in India”. Are they trying to pretend that Silver Lie is “open source” or just lump Microsoft in? Here is part of it:

Developers in India are not much aware about open source technologies and there aren’t much good development tools and support for them, says Joydip Kanjilal, ASP.NET professional at Microsoft, in conversation with CIOL.

In another new article, CIOL promotes a form of EDGI that goes under the *Spark banner [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. CIOL is rewriting many press releases, as we pointed out before, but its shallow promotion of Microsoft requires some criticism too.

Another branch of the ‘Microsoft press’, namely the Microsoft Subnet at IDG, is doing some PR for Microsoft by saying that there is “much fanfare” over Red Hat support in Hyper-V (whose fanfare? Microsoft’s?).

With much fanfare, Microsoft first submitted said drivers to the Linux kernel way back in July (its first, and so far only, contribution to Linux, for obvious reason). Those drivers were already tested to work with Red Hat and, of course, SUSE. And in October, Red Hat and Microsoft announced that they were joining each other’s virtualization partnership programs, and validated that their products worked on each other’s virtual machines. So what took Microsoft so long to release these Red Hat drivers to the public?

People have other virtualisation options, they don’t need Microsoft’s proprietary one. Let’s not forget the GPL violation that’s associated with Microsoft’s offering [1, 2, 3].

Regarding the virtualisation arrangement Microsoft has with Red Hat, it is a subject that we summarised a year ago. Red Hat is now backing virtualisation research (yes, Free software conducts research too, contrary to myths).

Red Hat is funding a new research centre at Newcastle University that is looking into areas such as grid and cloud computing, virtualisation and middleware.

Among Red Hat’s competitors in this area there’s Microsoft, its ally Novell, and VMware, which is run by former Microsoft executives [1, 2, 3, 4]. Here is a new article on the subject:

Red Hat sees the virtualisation market developing into a three-way fight between itself, Microsoft and VMWare as the technology is increasingly taken up in the business space, Red Hat’s senior director of virtualisation, Navin Thadani, said today.

However, he said, the advantage would lie with the two operating system companies, adding that although Novell and Citrix had teamed up to contest the same space, they stood more of a chance in the desktop virtualisation arena.

A year ago we explained how Microsoft distorted the Linux and virtualisation markets. With former Microsoft employees running VMware, a Microsoft ally running Xen (Citrix), and another Microsoft ally seemingly trying to conquer KVM (that would be Novell), the pressure is on Red Hat, which arguably bought KVM’s parent company because of Microsoft’s disruptive moves. █

“Microsoft is unique among proprietary software companies: they are the only ones who have actively tried to kill Open Source and Free Software. It’s not often someone wants to be your friend after trying to kill you for ten years, but such change is cause for suspicion.”

–Bradley M. Kuhn (SFLC)

Summary: As indicated in the title, this is a collection of many news items spanning many subjects

NOVELL’S biggest news this time around is its financial report, but we will cover that separately. Here are some news clippings about Novell’s proprietary (or otherwise non-SUSE) side of business.

Pulse

Novell keeps talking about Pulse, but there isn’t anything substantial to be seen yet. Brainshare 2010 is apparently just a month away and the Var Guy mentioned it along with Pulse:

When Novell Brainshare 2010 kicks off March 21 in Salt Lake City, the company will put several initiatives in the spotlight. Among the top two priorities. Promoting Novell Pulse (a real-time communication and social messaging platform for enterprises) and promoting SUSE Linux software partners.

Here is a whole new article about Pulse:

I had the opportunity to spend some time with the Novell Pulse team and take a deep look at their new social software solution. Announced during the e2.0 conference in San Francisco last Fall, Pulse is being positioned as a real-time enterprise collaboration platform. Novel, no stranger to the traditional collaboration space, just may have something unique and compelling in Pulse.

e-Directory

There is nothing exciting to see here, but Novell’s e-Directory was mentioned in the following new press releases and articles:

i. DeskAlerts releases new desktop alert software version

The new desktop alert software version now supports Novell directory service, eDirectory. With this new feature, DeskAlerts becomes a truly multinetwork desktop alert solution, able to send alerts to technologically and geographically diverse networks.

ii. Active Directory: 10 years old and thinking cloud

Directory technology had already been mastered by Novell and Banyan, along with others such as Sun. Still, Microsoft charged out of the gate with the intent of taking the industry by storm. And it succeeded. Today, Active Directory runs in more than 90% of the world’s 2,000 biggest companies, while the rest of the market picks up the leftovers.

iii. How to configure LDAP to boost application security

Microsoft Active Directory provides an LDAP interface to Windows-specific user data, and both Active Directory and its lighter cousin, Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM), are used by applications as primary data stores for user information. Other options for user directory services include the OpenLDAP project, and enterprise software, such as IBM Lotus Domino and Novell e-Directory, are often extended through the use of LDAP.

iv. DeskAlerts releases new desktop alert software version

The new desktop alert software version now supports Novell directory service, eDirectory. With this new feature, DeskAlerts becomes a truly multinetwork desktop alert solution, able to send alerts to technologically and geographically diverse networks.

Netware

According to this new press release (also found in here), Arkeia has some new offering with which to complement Novell.

New Novell OES 2 and NetWare Agents for Novell GroupWise, eDirectory, and iFolder

More coverage can be found here.

Data backup and recovery briefs: Arkeia Software introduces Arkeia Network Backup version 8.2

[...]

And with the Novell agents, the SMS interface can perform hot backups of Novell file systems and applications as well as forward and backward compatibility for data backup and recovery operations on Novell platforms.

There are few other news pages that allude to Netware, which is declining rapidly.

Zenworks

We’ve found quite a bit of coverage about it over the past two weeks:

• Novell’s Zenworks powers admin staff at Olympic HQ

The Vancouver convention centre, which is currently hosting thousands of Olympic reporters from around the world, is using Novell’s Zenworks Configuration Management on its administration network

• Rolling Out Windows 7

We also invited Novell for its ZenWorks product, but our publishing schedule didn’t allow enough time to get the software into our labs.

• NHS Bromley gets ‘Zen’ control

NHS Bromley has taken remote control of more than 800 PCs in its GP practices, using an IT solution from Novell.

• EHI’s industry round-up 25.02.10

Novell extends £6m NHS deal

Novell has announced it has extended its £6m NHS deal to provide IT security, infrastructure software and collaboration solutions in order to support the government’s cloud computing programme. The deal is for Novell’s Intelligent Workload Management solutions including ZENworks Configuration Management, Patch Management and SecureLogin and Teaming+Conferencing.

• Dell Buys Systems Management Specialist Kace

Kace products’ main system management rivals are Altiris, LANDesk, Novell ZENWorks and Microsoft SMS.

Legal

Groklaw has gathered a good collection of old articles about the SCO saga:

Of course, there was Groklaw, methodically answering SCO’s FUD on a daily basis, beginning in mid-May of 2003. But as you’ll see, the reaction to SCO was already formed, prior to Groklaw saying anything at all. Also, prior to Novell’s statement, which it made on May 28. It was immediate, it was negative, and it was international and across the board.

Then came a large number of posts about the latest from the SCO case:

It’s a plot, I tell you! The parties in SCO v. Novell are trying to cause me to lose my beauty sleep. Before I can finish doing the text of one filing, they file 25 more. Literally. They have filed between them 25 memoranda in opposition to the others’ motions in limine.

There is a lot more of that in:

1. More darts – SCO’s opposition to Daubert hearings and to Chatlos, Michels testimony
2. Judge Stewart Denies Novell Motion in Limine No. 7 – Updated 3Xs – More Orders Put SCO in a Real Pickle
3. SCO & Novell’s Motions in Limine and Daubert Motions – A Chart
4. Proposed Voir Dire Questions from Novell and SCO
5. Santa Cruz Listed Novell as Owning the Copyrights in 1999
6. Novell Moves Another Piece Forward: Files Request for Judicial Notice – Updated 2Xs
7. Reports from the Final PreTrial Hearing: SCO v. Novell – Updated- Minutes, Pretrial Order

Virtualisation

Early in the week we wrote about the Xen/KVM situation Novell is in after a deal with Citrix, a company about the same size as Novell.

Novell’s Ian Bruce wrote about the subject and also referred to the proprietary option, VMware.

For those who missed the news, here is a short summary:

Novell SUSE is Citrix XenServer “Perfect Guest”
Novell and Citrix announced this week that Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) has been certified as a “Perfect Guest” running on Citrix XenServer, with optimized performance and joint support for mutual customers. Citrix also signed on to Novell’s PlateSpin Recon for Assessment Program, so Citrix Solution Advisers (CSAs) can use the PlateSpin Recon workload planning tool to accelerate server consolidation and virtualization projects.

Also see [1, 2, 3] and this Reuters report which came out shortly after the press release (making it one of the first ones).

Xen’s Simon Crosby wrote about it and so did The Register, which chose an interesting headline (the author previously suggested a merger of the two companies):

Novell flirts with Citrix

[...]

As it turns out, Novell is going to embrace KVM inside of SUSE Linux side-by-side with Xen. KVM was rolled into SUSE Linux 11 on both desktops and servers last March as a technology preview, a status it has held since that time. But Applebaum confirmed to El Reg that with Service Pack 1 for SUSE Linux 11, KVM will get official and full support running embedded inside of that Linux distro.

Novell has not divulged the date when SUSE Linux 11 SP1 might ship, but the company tends to do updates every 12 to 15 months. That puts it at somewhere between March and June of this year, which is roughly the time we expect to see Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 6, which will put KVM in the forefront and which will not run on Itanium machines, as we previously reported.

And from another source:

Citrix Systems and Novell this week said they will collaborate on interoperability and assessment tools to reduce the costs and complexity of managing multiple virtual servers running on both Linux and Windows operating systems.

“Novell would be wise to support Xen and KVM,” says Paula Rooney. She has been writing about Xen for quite some time (although not so often).

Mail

There is nothing important to see here, except for Groupware support showing up in all sorts of articles, such as:

• CSC lays its cloud cards on the table

“The transition from an enterprise suite like Novell Groupware or Lotus Notes [to the cloud] is not trivial,” he said.

• RIM Touts New, “Free” BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) Express for SMBs

• RIM unveils free BlackBerry server

• RIM debuts free BlackBerry Enterprise Server for small businesses

• RIM to Roll out BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express

• Real-world Exchange Server 2007 migrations

Of those 550 respondents, 16.4% migrated from assorted non-Microsoft platforms including numerous versions of Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino, Novell GroupWise, Linux Postfix, Mirapoint products, Alt-N Technologies MDaemon and Ipswitch IMail Server. This minority of converts to Exchange Server 2007 also included several respondents that had previously used hosted email services.

• How Chatter May Win the Enterprise 2.0 Game (Maybe Even CRM)

The implications of this? Chatter becomes a core architectural component of organizations that adopt it, replacing (with simple and faster programming, and more powerful integration) Microsoft Sharepoint, IBM Notes, and (I feel nice today) even Novell Groupwise.

• RIM to Roll out BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express

• How to Set up an Email account on a BlackBerry Mobile Phone

• CompanionLink Announces Desktop Synchronization With Motorola DEVOUR

• Google Gains Momentum with Apps

Groupwise is generally losing clients, quite often to Microsoft and Google.

Security

New security issues have cropped up:

• Subject: [security-announce] SUSE Security Summary Report: SUSE-SR:2010:004

• ncpfs ‘ncpmount’ / ‘ncpumount’ Race Condition Security Issues

• Novell NetStorage Unspecified Code Execution Vulnerability

• Novell eDirectory eMBox SOAP Request Vulnerability

Here is something about Novell compatibility in an antivirus program. The following couple of press releases/articles also mention Novell in relation to security:

• CA Threat Manager For Linux Earns Virus Bulletin’s VB100 Award

CA, Inc. (Nasdaq: CA) today announced that its CA Threat Manager 8.1 for SUSE® Linux® has earned Virus Bulletin’s VB100 award. Virus Bulletin is one of the leading specialist publications in the field of viruses and related malware and is renowned for its independent comparative testing of anti-virus products and its VB100 testing.

• Small Software Security Firms Hack Into Market

Companies like Symantec(SYMC Quote), Check Point Software(CHKP Quote), McAfee(MFE Quote), Novell(NOVL Quote) and Sourcefire(FIRE Quote) stand to be beneficiaries of the growth in this market as consumers and businesses begin to see the desperate need to protect their systems against attack. Not all are attractive investments.

Carmi Levy at Processor.com is approaching Novell’s Richard Whitehead, as usual (for another quote).

“The common misunderstanding is that you ‘move’ to a virtualized environment,” says Richard Whitehead, Novell’s director of marketing for data center solutions (www.novell.com). “The reality is that virtualization is part of your IT infrastructure. You need to think intelligently about your data center across physical, virtual, and cloud. One of the largest oversights is in the management of virtualization, including security. Take time now to create a strategy, track the results, and ensure you are virtualizing for business reasons.”

People

Here is further coverage of Ron Hovsepian’s decision to change staff — a decision that we wrote about earlier this month.

Earlier this week IT Business Edge contributor Don Tennant wrote a post in which he suggested that IT industry groups such as TechAmerica should offer centralized training programs that would help folks gain the IT skills desired by employers. Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian once told Tennant he’d had to replace a quarter of Novell’s work force to obtain the skills he felt necessary to drive the company forward.

Why couldn’t Hovsepian retrain existing employees? He told Tennant:

… The cycle time is the biggest issue. The brutality of the pressure the company has to operate under in 90 days is what drives us.

The following personal profile contains the bit about Novell buying WordPerfect:

It was exactly 15 years ago that Alan Ashton made every other male on the face of the Earth look like a chump by comparison.

[...]

In 1994, they sold WordPerfect to Novell for $600 million.

The Advisory Board of Viewfinity is expanded, but watch who comes to the table:

Systems management icon Greg Butterfield, former CEO and Chairman of Altiris, is renowned for his business achievements that include the growth and mergers/acquisitions of WordPerfect to Novell…

There are other new examples of appointments that include former Novell staff (mostly executives). For example:

• Fidelis Security Systems Hires Gary Benedetti to Lead Worldwide Sales

Mr. Benedetti was most recently VP of Worldwide Sales for Epok, the industry leader in SharePoint security and SharePoint extranet solutions. Previously, he was VP of Sales for e-Security, prior to its acquisition by Novell where he was instrumental in the company’s growth and a key member of the management team throughout the sale of e-Security to Novell, remaining with Novell as the VP of Audit Solutions. Prior sales leadership experience includes serving as VP of Strategic Business Solutions for AOL, VP of Sales for the Eastern region at Netscape, and VP of Sales at Interactive Media, as well as senior sales positions with AimTech and Oracle.

• DPI appoints Butler to spearhead technical support service

Having started his career in technical sales support at Centerprise in 1990, Butler formulated firm knowledge of computer and network technologies, becoming a certified engineer on Novell, Microsoft, Cisco and Compaq systems.

• MEGA Appoints New Executive for International Expansion

Fort has worked with enterprise software companies for more than 25 years. He has held positions in sales, business development, and management at Oracle, Novell and Bull, and has consulted on business development, alliances, and marketing with leading software vendors.

• The new, green land rush

Post-retirement malaise first pushed Kraig Higginson, an early investor in computer networking company Novell, towards saving the planet

Then there is this reference to Ray Noorda in the Indian press (also here):

All too often, such situations arise in business. There’s nothing good or bad, right or wrong about these. It is just the way things happen. Start-ups are no exception. Many years ago, Ray Noorda, the legendary founder of Novell, had popularised the word ‘co-petition’ implying that in business, cooperation and competition could go hand in hand. Indeed, there are umpteen such examples in automobiles, consumer goods and technology.

The “co-opetition” term is repeated in the ‘Microsoft press’:

Certainly, for Microsoft partners, this also raises some questions since most also carry gear from Cisco, HP or both. What’s your take on the implications of Cisco and HP going separate ways? Will we indeed see others follow suit? Among other things, could this lead Microsoft to rethink its strategy of working closer with the likes of Novell, Red Hat and Zend? Could co-opetition as we know it be on the line here, or is this just a case of Cisco playing hardball?

Partners

There is not much to see here except the Citrix relationship which was mentioned earlier. However, Novell was mentioned in some press coverage of other companies and their press releases too. We found examples in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16]. Will Novell receive some CODiE honours this year?

Last year, Salesforce.com, Adobe and Novell were the recipients of multiple awards. This year, the cloud makes its appearance in a couple of new categories and there are many familiar — and some newer — names aiming for the biggest awards.

Novell also maintains good relationships with Utah and it offers room to this conference:

The conference includes presentations by and collaboration among BYU engineering students, international scientists and researchers. The event is sponsored by Novell, the Technology Center at Novell, and Sustainable Energy Solutions.

So, in summary, the main news is probably to do with Citrix. The rest is very minor. █

Summary: Another loss for Novell and odd new moves in mail and virtualisation

NOVELL is increasingly being dumped for Google and several days ago we found another new example:

Students and faculty alike who have been growing frustrated with Novell Tigermail should soon be able to breathe a sigh of relief.

The university’s current e-mail client will be replaced with Google Apps for Education. The shift will not require anyone to change their e-mail addresses.

They should host their own mail. Sharing people’s private correspondence with some dissociated company is neither wise nor fair. But that’s another story.

One of the OpenSUSE folks writes about Bongo, which is a mail project that’s derived from what Novell buried [1, 2] after it had signed the deal with Microsoft (see this story about Zimbra, which is now owned by former Microsoft executives at VMware).

I’ll take Bongo as my first example. For those that have no idea what Bongo is let me explain: Bongo is an evolution of some forward thinking by some people who used to work at Novell. It started out as the Hula Project; then Novell sold the related assets off due to strategy alignments (or whatever); a few of us wanted to continue and forked the code and created the Bongo Project. OK so that’s a brief history but what is it? Bongo is a lightweight and simple e-mail & calendaring solution, it is based on proven technology – the heritage goes back to NIMS if I’m not mistaken. Whoopee do there are like a million and one e-mail solutions out there. Yes but not all in one solutions that are light on resources and contain all functions. Bongo is NOT a groupware product, it is aimed at SMBs, geeks education and pretty much anyone that just wants e-mail, calendaring and contacts. Think of it as a FOSS solution to provide the functionality of Gmail+Google Calendar. Here endeth the history lesson.

[...]

I know for a fact that there may be one or two items that I’ve listed that could be contentious, and do you know what? I sincerely hope so Now don’t get me wrong, I really do appreciate and am grateful for all the work effort and money that Novell has invested in openSUSE; but it isn’t fair at all for Novell to keep carrying the Project. If anyone thinks they’re not, you are living in lala land. Sure some of it might be their own doing, but a lot isn’t and it is up to us the community help them so that we can benefit even more.

OpenSUSE has been eerily quiet since Zonker left.

Going back to VMware and Zimbra, see the following posts about EMC and Microsoft:

• Theory: Why EMC Gave VMWare to Microsoft (Employee)
• Microsoft Could Enter EMC from the Back Door
• Perspective on EMC and Microsoft (and what it means to GNU/Linux)
• Maritz and Tucci’s Microsoft Slog Against VMware
• Fortify, EMC and Microsoft’s Coalitions Against GNU/Linux

To cut a long story short, EMC has VMware, which has Zimbra. Now there is this new press release which shows EMC supporting a direct rival of its very own Zimbra:

EMC Helps Define Information Governance for Microsoft Exchange 2010

EMC® Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced it is expanding its efforts to help customers accelerate their journey to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 implementations and build actionable information governance strategies. Exchange 2010-ready, EMC SourceOne™ solutions further extend the archiving, retention, and e-discovery features of Exchange 2010, allowing organizations to manage their e-mail and other data efficiently and cost effectively while ensuring that all information is protected and available.

That’s a little iffy. Doesn’t EMC support Zimbra? Let’s remember that EMC is Microsoft’s Partner of the Year for 2008 and so is Citrix, which has just partnered with Novell. From the press release:

Citrix Systems, Inc. and Novell, Inc. announced a collaboration that expands choice for customers through increased virtualization interoperability and new assessment tools to help pinpoint the economically most advantageous approach to virtualization. Through this new partnership, Novell has certified SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a Perfect Guest running on Citrix XenServer and both companies will provide joint technical support to customers. As a result of this agreement, the more than 4,500 enterprise applications certified as Novell Ready for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server are now Citrix Ready community-verified when running in a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server guest virtual machine on XenServer.

[...]

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the only Linux operating system that has been optimized to be the perfect guest on all major hypervisors, with outstanding performance when running on XenServer.

That last sentence is a strong and ambitious claim, but Microsoft’s support for SUSE can count for something extra (from Novell’s point of view). The above can also be found right here in Reuters and some other sources, but what’s even more interesting is Novell’s apparent attempt to catch up with Red Hat where Xen is involved. Novell already builds a Wiki about what seems like a KVM hypervisor.

Believe it or not, it looks as though Novell is now researching the creation of yet another virtualization platform. No, this one isn’t based on Xen. Instead, the software company appears to be jumping on the KVM bandwagon and is looking to build a new open source project based on KVM.

Well, KVM is Red Hat’s, which makes it just slightly awkward. █

Summary: News touching on Novell’s non-Free/libre component of the business

THIS is the third part which covers Novell news from the first two weeks of February. This part covers Novell’s proprietary side, of which there is a lot (Novell is predominantly a closed-source company). What we happen to have found along the way this week is that Novell is not just a company that makes jewelry; there is yet another company called Novell Pharmaceutical Laboratories. Here is what we gather from the press release:

Company Report is a private Company Report that provides up to date insight into the structure and operations of privately-held pharmaceutical, biotechnology and biomedical companies.

Well, Novell is many other things. There are at least two more companies with the name Novell and it is also a surname (often mentioned in the case of murder, martial arts, and basketball).

Anyway, let’s move on to the news.

Novell’s CMO John Dragoon asks himself whether Twitter is the next CB Radio. With new products like Pulse, Novell is trying to ride tomorrow’s wave, so far without success. Here is a fairly new article which covers Wave and mentions Novell.

Since then the firm’s wonks have been working on extension ideas for the tool, and reminding anyone that might want to listen that the likes of Novell and Salesforce.com have also been happily toying with it.

Here is another news article that recalls Novell’s affair with Lotus. This contains religious elements for some reason:

Novell wanted to take over Lotus but the deal fell through in New York City when the Lotus atheists had a wee bit too much to drink and the Mormon Novell folk pulled the plug on the deal. Lotus was always going to be the kind of company IBM – originally a Quaker company – would buy.

“Mormon Novell folk,” eh? Well, anyway, here is some more news from Utah.

SCO

Groklaw seems to be the only site that looks at the SCO-Novell case. The latest sample of articles actually happens to show the relationship between SCO and Maureen O’Gara. Here is a key part:

SCO’s materials on its website are not really what I expect them to bring up at trial, by the way. Paul Murphy, for example, isn’t likely to be used any further than on that list, I would think. SCO calls him an analyst. And even the witness list isn’t for sure. For example, while Maureen O’Gara is listed still on SCO’s witness list, I can’t imagine what usefulness she has now that the court has just ruled that a decline in stock value isn’t special damages SCO can claim. But with SCO, who knows? It’s a very small group of willing helpers now.

Other coverage of the SCO case includes:

• Two More Bills From Pachulski Stang – Still no MORs – Updated: Ocean Park’s 3rd Bill

• Novell Asks For Extension to File with Supreme Court & Judge Stewart Issues Trial Order – Updated

Novell has filed a second request for an extension of time to file its appeal with the US Supreme Court. It would like until March 4th.

• Novell Motion in Limine No. 1 – Let’s All Live by the Mandate Rule, Shall We?

Novell has filed its first motion in limine [PDF], the full title of which is Motion in Limine No. 1 to Exclude Evidence and Argument Concerning Claims Not Included in SCO’s Appeal or the Tenth Circuit’s Limited Mandate. It’s making me chuckle.

• A Blizzard of Motions in Limine in SCO v. Novell – Updated – SCO’s as text (many texts here)

More texts in:

• Novell’s Motions in Limine, as text, #s 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 – Slander of Title Motions

• Novell’s Motions in Limine – to Exclude Testimony, #s 12-19

• Novell’s Motions in Limine #s 9, 10, 11, as text – RE: SVRX Licenses, Substantial Performance, Arbitration

• SCO’s Opposition to Novell’s Motion in Limine No. 1: Hey! No Fair, You Guys!

SCO has filed its response to Novell’s Motion in Limine No. 1. And Novell has added another lawyer to the team, Daniel P. Muino.

SCO’s opposition in essence says, “No fair, Novell! We appealed the copyright ownership issue, and the slander of title is sort of related, and so that should be enough.”

Here’s what I don’t see SCO saying: “We *did* appeal the slander of title decision.”

Finance

In less than two weeks from now, Novell will deliver its financial results. It comes on February 25^th:

Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) today announced it will issue a press release providing its first fiscal quarter 2010 financial results on Thursday, February 25, 2010, following the market close.

It was over $200,000,000 in losses the last time, under rather exceptional circumstances

Other financial coverage of Novell (fairly minor) includes:

• Unusual Options Activity Review – SCSS, NOVL, CY, CPB, OSG, FLO, ELX, PNRA, VIX, XLU

Bullish trading was also seen in Novell (NOVL), Cypress Semiconductor (CY), Campbell’s Soup (CPB).

• SmarTrend’s Candlestick Scanner Detects Bearish Inside Day Pattern for Novell (NOVL) (also here)

• Looking ahead to McAfee, Inc. earnings; MFE, NOVL, CHKP

MFE is in the Security Software & Services industry group where it competes for investor dollars with companies like Novell Inc. (NOVL), which is set to release its earnings on 02/25 and last reported a -1331.16% decline in quarter-over-quarter EPS.

Back to Back

One of Microsoft’s favourite liars, the Yankee Group, is cited right here in relation to Novell:

Zeus Kerravala, a distinguished research fellow at Yankee Group, said Cisco needs to be careful that its plan doesn’t backfire, recalling how Novell drove away many customers because of its frustrating 90-day reinstall cycle for trial software in the early 1990s.

It is not entirely clear if the following article refers to SUSE or to Netware.

Several other ATUS staff are testing Windows 7 in different applications, such as faculty and administrative environments, and Nichols said the only problem has been with using a mix of Novell and Microsoft servers.

Another related new article:

VTB24’s IT infrastructure is a distributed heterogeneous system that includes Microsoft Windows, as well as UNIX and Novell network operating systems.

Here is how Active Directory and Novell act as barriers to Mac adoption in businesses:

“Apple’s traditional structure was that they were rather closed off; for ten years or so they were rather an insular solution,” he said. “But a lot the integration we are doing these days is putting Macs into Active Directory environments, putting Macs into Novell environments. Vendors like Novell are also coming to the party… and there are a bunch of standards that traditional enterprise customers are familiar with. The other place we have being doing a lot of stuff with enterprise is in with multimedia and digital education content delivery. It is a vehicle we are talking more and more with customers at the moment.”

GroupWise is mentioned in this related piece which is titled “Why Apple Won’t Let the Mac and iPhone Succeed in Business”

Macs in enterprise: The bigger you are, the harder it is One factor working against Apple’s prospects in business environments is that fact that businesses that have gone all-Mac have had to figure out themselves how to make it work. For smaller businesses, that’s not so hard to do. Microsoft Office for Mac has perhaps 90 percent of the capabilities of the Windows version, for example, and if you need Visual Basic support, you can use the older Office 2003 version rather than the VB-less Office 2008 version. For email, there are clients for Exchange, Lotus Notes, and Novell GroupWise available. The Mac OS, of course, supports POP and IMAP email servers as well.

Mail

Speaking of GroupWise, it gets mentioned in quite a few articles, but none is focused just on GroupWise. For example we have:

• New York Consolidating E-Mail Statewide

But another 24 agencies (totaling 93,000 users) currently work on one of at least five other e-mail systems, most which are Lotus or Novell. Those will be migrated. “We don’t know what we’ll encounter in terms of their own applications that might have been embedded in their own e-mail systems,” Mayberry-Stewart said.

• Global partnership brings better email archiving to Alfresco

OpsMailmanager enables enterprises to store and search for email messages and their attachments in an Alfresco repository. Leveraging open standards-based technologies, OpsMailmanager provides easy integration with all leading email clients including MS Outlook, Lotus Notes and Novell Groupwise.

• Global partnership brings better email archiving to Alfresco

Leveraging open standards-based technologies, OpsMailmanager provides easy integration with all leading email clients including MS Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Lotus Notes and Novell Groupwise.

• Choice of Messaging Architects’ M+Archive in Migration Project Results in 30% Cost Savings for Deer Park School District (also here)

Messaging Architects, global experts in email risk management, announced today a complimentary online seminar, at which Deer Park Independent School District will share with attendees the strategies they employed for a successful and painless email migration from Novell GroupWise to Microsoft Exchange.

GroupWise was also mentioned in some other places, but it’s never important. Tomorrow we will show that GroupWise continues losing in the market.

Virtualisation

“Virtual Desktop with a Twist” is an IDG article that mentions Novell in the context of virtualisation.

This approach is ideal for server virtualization where multiple servers each are running different operating systems like Novell, NT or Linux on a single “real” server through virtual machines. We in turn virtualize individual users under a single operating system.

This new report about Xen — and one that mentions Novell in fact — has just been published, but it is merely being promoted as it is not simple to get hold of. Here is another new bit of analysis:

For example, Novell’s PlateSpin Recon can help create a list of applications in your data center and provide some of their characteristics and processing requirements.

PlateSpin never gained much popularity under Novell’s wing. Here is something from VMware which supports SUSE.

Some of the features included in this release support secure tunnelling using SSL, two factor authentication with RSA SecurID, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Thin Client Add-On RPM package and a full command line interface.

Security

Novell suffered from some flaws in SUSE and in its proprietary software too [1, 2]. SUSE was also mentioned in the following batch of stories:

• ESET is First To Win 60 VB Awards

February’s Virus Bulletin report focused on the Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 platform. Of the nine vendors participating, six passed and three failed. Neither Symantec nor McAfee were able to provide products supporting the Novell Suse Linux server platform.

• ESET: First Company to 60 VB100 Awards

• ESET breaks records with 60th VB100 award win (also in here)

ADAOX Middle East, the exclusive distribution partner and the regional business development centre of ESET NOD32 Antivirus, announced that ESET, the leader in proactive threat protection, has captured a record 60th VB100 award from Virus Bulletin, the widely-respected independent comparative testing group. February’s report focused on the Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 platform. Of the nine vendors participating, six passed and three failed.

• ESET: First Company to 60 VB100 Awards

• Novell on Aurora Breach – new threats to watch

What are your thoughts on the Aurora breach? Post your comments and let’s start a discussion.

No comments posted. Novell fails to gain attention even when it asks for attention.

People

CBR has a new interview with Novell’s CEO Ron Hovsepian, but it is available in a Microsoft format only.

I caught up with the president and CEO of Novell, Ron Hovsepian recently, to find out more about the company’s recently announced Intelligent Workload Management strategy.

Of course, I also took the opportunity to ask whether he still believes that the firm’s controversial agreement with Microsoft on Windows-Linux interoperability and virtualisation was in the firm’s best interests, considering how the open source community reacted to the deal for the most part (angrily).

I’ve listened to the whole interview and it’s pretty decent. Both sides made a good case for themselves and Hovsepian was not given an easy time, either. Hovsepian was speaking at this event too:

Among the key speakers were C S Venkatraman, GM (Electrical and Electronics), ERC, Tata Motors, Ronald W Hovsepian, President and CEO, Novell and Francois Guibert, Corporate Vice President, STMicroelectronics. The Technovation Awards 2010 were also presented at the summit.

Some former Novell employees are entering other companies and John Donovan, who is not CEO as the following text suggests, embarks on a mountaineering trip with other businessmen:

Philip Cronin, the CEO of Intel Australia, is proud of his achievement as a mountaineer. Together with three other Australian businessmen – John Donovan, CEO of Novell, Peter Wright, owner of Priceline, and Enda Mahoney, vice-president of Blackrock – he reached the base camp of Mount Everest. By doing so, the group raised $A50,000 for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

According to this report and a press release, Kryterion’s new Chief Scientist has a 7-year history with Novell.

Kryterion, the world leader in online secure testing and a prominent firm in traditional test delivery, has announced that William Dorman has been appointed as chief executive officer.

[...]

Kryterion has also announced the appointment of Dr. Dave Foster as Chief Scientist and Executive Vice President.

Foster is currently a board director of Kryterion. He founded Galton Technologies in 1997 and Caveon in 2003. Earlier, he directed the test development efforts at Novell from 1990 to 1997, introducing many new innovations, including adaptive testing, testing in multiple languages, and simulations-based testing.

Experience with Novell spotted here:

Zerbib has 16 years of professional experience from employment at QUEST Software, Compuware, SoftCompany, NEURONS and EMS Concept, working with IT and networking products and services from such providers as Alcatel, Checkpoint, Cisco, Citrix, HP, IBM, Novell, and Nortel Networks.

The new Director of a Technical Engineering Team at Messaging Architects has a past with Novell:

Messaging Architects, global experts in email risk management, today announced that Richard Cabana has joined the company as Director of the new Technical Engineering Team.

[...]

“…As we start to deploy our next-generation of Identity-Driven and Policy-Based products, the expertise he acquired while at Novell and then at Red Hat will be of tremendous value to both our current and prospective clients.”

Utah Technology Council (UTC) has added someone with a past at Novell too:

* David Bradford (photo) – Bradford is currently the CEO of Fusion-io. Previously he was with Novell, Inc., where he served as Senior Vice-President and General Counsel. He was instrumental in taking the company from a small start-up to a multi-billion dollar corporation. He has also served as chairman of the Business Software Alliance, the world’s leading trade association for business software companies. Bradford was also approved as a member of UTC’s Executive Committee.

Here is SD Times advertising a job opening at Novell:

James Bottomley, distinguished engineer at Novell and maintainer of the Linux SCSI subsystems, has learned how to deal with such problems. As the Linux community is larger than the Rails community, there are more egos to butt up against, he said. He has three pieces of advice for smoothing over the inevitable social friction that can occur within an open-source project.

[...]

Joe Brockmeier worked with Bottomley at Novell until the end of January, when he left the company to pursue other interests. At Novell, he served as openSUSE community manager, and also oversaw the documentation development processes on the platform. Brockmeier said that “community manager” is a misleading title.

Partners

Here is a training milestone for Novell and TAR College.

These include incorporating professional certification curriculum such as Cisco Certified Network Associates (CCNA) and network security into networking-related courses, Novell Certified Linux Professional programmes into information systems programmes, SAP modules into business information systems courses as well as incorporating the latest programming concepts and tools governed under either Java development teams or Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance (MSDN AA) into the respective programme of studies.

Due to concerted efforts to promote students to go for the CCNA certification, TAR College was awarded “In Recognition of Great Collaborative Efforts for Student Certification” during the 4th Cisco Networking Academy Annual Conference 2009. The college was also awarded the “Best Novell Academic Training Partner 2009″ at the NATP Summit 2009. The NCL Solutions and TAR College collaboration has led to the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on SUSE Linux Innovation Club Evangelist (SLICE) programme to mark a higher level of synergy for more new and dynamic collaborative activities.

Novell is also mentioned in relation to SIEM:

With much of the interest in SIEM products driven by compliance initiatives, the market for SIEM products is jam-packed with vendors, many competing with similar products. Established names include Arcsight Inc., CA Inc., Intellitactics Inc., IBM, NetIQ Corp. and EMC’s RSA Security division. Other vendors include LogLogic Inc., NetForensics Inc., Novell Inc., Sensage Inc., Symantec Corp. and TriGeo Network Security Inc.

Other press releases and articles where Novell is mentioned are:

• Unitrends Appoints Philip Eliot Chairman of the Board
• Novosoft Partners with 1C Company to Bring the Leading Backup Solution to Eastern Europe
• Makara’s do-it-yourself platform cloud
• Computer Technology & Networking Program offered at CollegeAmerica’s Phoenix Campus for Students to enter Technology Industry
• VMware Partner Exchange 2010 Kicks Off With Record-Breaking 2,600+ Attendees, 55 Sponsors and 45 Countries Represented
• Infor Takes Ad Campaign Global to EMEA, Latin America and Asia
• Koenig Now offers training for CANAC – Implementing NAC Appliance
• ASAP Releases Winners of 2010 Alliance Excellence Awards
• Unitrends Free Shirt Promotion Draws “Amazing” Response
• Implied Volatility Falling on Novell Inc.; NOVL, ASIA, CHKP
• What is cloud computing and how do I use it?
• Computer Service & Networking @ Northland Community & Technical College

Marketing

A YouTube account called “IBMInnovation” has uploaded this video which sheds light on the current relationship between IBM and Novell.

John Dragoon, the marketing manager, writes about GNU/Linux in relation to Apple’s latest hypefest [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

I believe Linux is the ideal operating system for creating and delivering the “Platform Specific User Experience”. The market, however, is moving rapidly and we must focus on the magic formula for success if reality is to match the vision.

Novell is still offering some real estate for Utah events, based on this assorted report.

Networking » The Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum presents local author Larry Myler, who will give the keynote address at the forum’s luncheon event, 12 p.m., Novell Building A, 1800 Novell Place, Provo. Free for UVEF members, $25 for nonmembers. RSVP at www.uvef.com.

There hasn’t been a word about BrainShare for quite a while. What’s up with that? Might it be canceled again due to lack of interest? █

Summary: Microsoft projects are still upselling a distribution from which Microsoft extracts money for imaginary software patents

THE LATEST bit of news about Moonlight was expected to have untold information which is crucial. This very self-explanatory picture reminds us that Moonlight is essentially a Microsoft project and Microsoft is not allowed to help its #1 competitor, by definition (unless it somehow helps Microsoft in another way).

After a little bit of research it turned out that Novell customers are still in a privileged position when it comes to Moonlight. Sam Varghese writes:

There is one simple reason – the version of Moonlight that other distributions can offer will be able to play only media which are in free or open source formats.

To play any other format means one has to buy licences for proprietary media codecs from the owners.

Users who obtain Moonlight from Novell will have access to these codecs.

But you wouldn’t know about this if you read the Novell press release. (Microsoft hasn’t deemed this announcement, which apparently is another earth-shaking one for the Moonlight project head, Miguel de Icaza, important enough to issue a media release).

Here’s how Novell puts it: “The covenant is no longer limited to users that obtain Moonlight from Novell or its channel, but now covers users who obtain Moonlight from any third party, including other Linux distributors. Media Codecs for MP3 and VC1, and in the future H.264 and AAC, are supported through the Microsoft Media Pack, a Microsoft-delivered set of media codes that offer optimized and licensed decodecs to every Linux user who obtains Moonlight from Novell.”

For completeness, here is Novell’s announcement and a variety of articles about it:

• Novell finalizes Moonlight 2; offers broader distribution terms
• Moonlight, Microsoft Patent Covenant Updates
• Moonlight 2 hot on the heels of Silverlight
• Silverlight for Linux Evolves, Moonlight 2 Available for Download
• Open source Silverlight clone rev’d

Varghese has also attempted to find out what led to hostility towards GNU recently, after complaints about posts in Planet GNOME [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. He writes:

A member of the GNOME Foundation board has denied that a post by GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza led to a discussion on the Foundation mailing list which resulted in a call for the project to cut its ties with the GNU Project.

Behdad Esfahbod made reference to a story in these columns, wherein it was claimed that a Planet GNOME post by De Icaza, about Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, served as the catalyst for another Foundation member, Lucas Rocha, to start a discussion on members’ complaints about the type of content appearing on the Planet.

It is commonly argued that posts endorsing VMware were the cause for this whole incident. VMware is not much of a friend and we wrote about it in:

• No Point to Microsoft’s New Datacentres, Microsoft-dominated VMware Comes to Redmond’s Back Garden
• VMware Turns Sour After Microsoft Intervention
• What is Going on at VMware?

Speaking of which, watch how Microsoft still discriminates against GNU/Linux distributions that don’t pay Microsoft.

9 Reasons Enterprises Shouldn’t Switch To Hyper-V

[...]

1. Breadth of OS support
Before we get into the nitty gritty, let’s start with the most basic of features and simplest of tasks. Say you are an IT shop that supports more than just Windows servers; you have a mixed environment with different flavors of Linux and Unix. Hyper-V, however, supports only Windows and SuSE Linux. That’s it. If I am to recommend an enterprise virtualization infrastructure, it would need to support a bit more than one flavor of Linux.

After Xen was brought closer to Microsoft, its partner of the year Citrix is helping Hyper-V using Xen, as expected. From The Register:

You heard that right. Citrix is getting its virtual machine failover technology to Microsoft’s Hyper-V and integrating it with Systems Center management tools ahead of its own XenServer/Essentials combo.

Microsoft is just trying to distort this entire market. Almost all the large virtualisation companies (except Qumranet/KVM, which Red Hat bought, as well as Virtual Iron, which oracle bought to bury) are there to serve Microsoft/Windows in some way. Novell is the same and it is going downhill. Tom Harvey has just written about the two executives who flee Novell and he adds this factoid:

Williams is trimming his estimates of Novell revenues for the first quarter of the new fiscal year by 3 percent and for next year by 1 percent compared to this year, with earnings per share for the year at 31 cents, down 9.6 percent over the current year.

“The biggest risk that we see for Novell in the year ahead is that management will lose credibility with the Street and the stock will be dead money until proof of concept becomes visible to investors,” the report said.

As we wrote earlier in the week, the ridiculously high bonuses that Ron Hovsepian receives may indicate that he would otherwise leave the company, leading to a huge loss of credibility. █

Summary: A mixture of Novell news from the past week

MORE articles than usual have mentioned Novell in the past week, so here is a quick rundown.

SCO

Interesting things happen in the SCO case, whose judge buys some more time.

So, in the end, SCO got a delay, but there was no decision by the appeals court in time for them. So the real victors were IBM, Novell and the US Trustee’s Office, because what they asked for, they eventually got in essence: a neutral to take over for SCO management.

More from Groklaw:

Things are not so free and easy in SCOland, I gather, now that the Chapter 11 Trustee is running the company. Berger Singerman has filed a motion on its own behalf asking the court to please amend a prior order, the October 5, 2007 Administrative Order Establishing Procedures for Interim Monthly Compensation of Professionals, so the firm can pay itself from the retainer it has in hand. It’s been doing that for a while, but it seems the Chapter 11 Trustee notices that there is no explicit allowance to use the retainer in that order. If you remember, he already signaled that he’s looking into all the professional fees. So Berger Singerman would like an explicit order from the court saying it’s all right to do that.

A legal Web site has released a newsletter which covers the SCO-Novell UNIX case.

A ruling by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals vacating a lower court grant of summary judgment on the issue of copyright infringement in the SCO v. Novell litigation involving rights to the UNIX operating system…

Finance

In financial news, StockPreacher.com has another new report about Novell. There have been many of these recently, for whatever reason.

StockPreacher.com announces an investment report featuring technology company Novell Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL). The report includes financial and investment analysis, analyst consensus, and pertinent industry information you need to know to make an educated investment decision.

Networking

A Web site about printers/cartridges has this new page mentioning support for Novell Netware and lessons from Netware days are also recalled in Roughly Drafted and this long report.

Microsoft (MSFT) is another company Pabrai describes as a non-innovator that is excellent at scaling up the successful innovations of others. Microsoft’s own inventions have often failed, but when it has taken a competitor’s existing idea and applied Microsoft’s know-how is when it has been at its most successful. It took the idea of the computer mouse and graphical user interface from Apple (AAPL), Excel from Lotus, Word from Word Perfect, networking from Novell (NOVL), Internet Explorer from Netscape, XBOX from Playstation and the list goes on. In these cases, Microsoft waited for a product/service to demonstrate a certain acceptance by customers, and then went after this now proven market.

The Indian press has published this chat with a Novell SVP:

Kent Erickson, senior vice-president and general manager – workgroup of Novell spoke to DNA’s Praveena Sharma on how Novell is sitting on the cusp of a business transition.

About Active Directory, there is the following portion from IDG:

Novell was also mentioned more than once as Active Directory was compared with eDirectory (called Novell Directory Services at that time). Many feel that Novell was actually acquired by Cambridge Technology Partners (see “Pondering Novell’s future”) in 2001.

When it comes to Vista 7, Microsoft is admitting that compatibility issues persist and Novell is part of their problem.

The top three non-fixable compatibility problems include system level driver issues and references to legacy network configurations (for example, Novell network drivers).

Virtualisation

We have already explained how Microsoft impacted Xen, after Ignition Partners got involved and Citrix approached the Cambridge-based company near Redmond (with a former Microsoft employee inside). Ubuntu, Red Hat and the Linux Foundation moved over to KVM, which was bought by Red Hat. They wanted distance or independence from Microsoft’s ecosystem (XenSource/Citrix), according to at least one source. It leaves Novell in a decent relationship with Xen because Novell is close to Microsoft.

Novell’s virtualisation endeavour was mentioned in quite a few places this week, including:

i. The life and death of a virtual machine

Instead of expanding, however, the organisation shrank its data centre by consolidating 100 physical servers to 45 Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Servers, then virtualising 25 data centre servers into five physical machines.

ii. Getting a grip on multivendor virtualization

Indeed, the overall server hypervisor market is becoming rich with options, including Microsoft Hyper-V, Parallels Server for Macs, VMware ESX and Xen variants from companies such as Citrix, Oracle, Novell, Red Hat and Sun (although this last one may disappear, as essentially did the Virtual Iron hypervisor, once the Oracle acquisition closes).

iii. Hospital insources data center with PlateSpin P2V migration

A Midwestern hospital extricated itself from an unfavorable data center outsourcing deal using Novell PlateSpin physical-to-virtual migration software and VMware virtualization.

iv. VMware: five biggest challenges of server virtualisation

One way of getting around the problem is to use workload analysis and planning tools such as Novell’s Platespin. These tools evaluate what level of capacity is likely to be required for a virtualised environment based on the profile of current physical servers in terms of memory, disc, processor and network bandwidth usage.

v. Novell releases new version of its data centre profiling tool

Novell (Nasdaq:NOVL) today announced the release of its PlateSpin Recon 3.7, the latest version of its data centre workload profiling, analysis and planning tool.

vi. Mindware to showcase state-of-the-art solutions from leading IT brands at ‘GITEX 2009’

Mail

GroupWise support was seen in just a few places including this GroupWise press release about Palm Pre support from CompanionLink. There was more coverage of this and some about Notify:

NotifyLink also supports a variety of mobile devices in addition to the Palm Pre as well as a number of email platforms including Novell’s(R) GroupWise(R)…

More on GroupWise can be found here:

As Novell is moving more and more to Linux, I felt lucky today and once more was in the desperate hope that one more task which I have to do so far using an RDP session on a Windows machine can finally be handled natively on my openSUSE 11.2 installation: Administering the corporate eDirectory and GroupWise system.

The city of Los Angeles is abandoning GroupWise for sure and IDG has spread the message widely (also here, here, and here).

The City of Los Angeles isn’t giving up on a proposed plan that would replace its Microsoft Office applications and Novell GroupWise e-mail system with the hosted Google Apps services, according to a report released last week by Miguel Santana, the city’s administrative officer. He said that city officials are plowing ahead with an analysis of every aspect of a project that could turn Los Angeles into Google’s marquee cloud users or a scarecrow.

The opposition to this move has not stopped.

Simpson’s letter represents the latest effort to get the city of L.A to change its mind about a $7.25 million plan to replace its Novell GroupWise e-mail and Microsoft Office applications with Google Apps.

Identity Management

For Novell Identity Manager, there is still this successful deployment around London.

South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) has automated the management of 8,000 user accounts for its IT network by using Novell Identity Manager.

The main development was actually around SAP, whose special relationship with Novell can easily be understood given renewed speculations that Microsoft would buy SAP. Here is the press release (also here) and a lot of coverage that came as a result:

i. SAP and Novell team up to integrate GRC software with IT infrastructure

SAP and Novell are extending their partnership and integrating products to help organizations deal with the complexity of managing governance, risk and compliance (GRC) technology, company spokespeople said here at SAP TechEd 2009 Tuesday.

ii. Novell, SAP Partner for Governance, Compliance

SAP and Novell this week said they plan to extend their development partnership to deliver the next generation of integrated governance, risk and compliance software applications.

iii. SAP To Detail HP, Novell Development Plans At TechEd Conference (also here)

SAP will unveil expanded technology partnerships with Hewlett-Packard and Novell at its TechEd conference in Phoenix for partner and customer developers next week.

SAP and Novell, who already have a partnership built around Novell’s SUSE Linux, will announce plans to develop governance, risk and compliance systems based on Novell’s identity and security management software, said Zia Yusuf, executive vice president of SAP’s global ecosystem and partner group.

iv. SAP and Novell Join Forces on Governance, Risk and Compliance Solutions

v. SAP and Novell Expand Global Partnership

From Network World (also in other IDG sites):

Novell and SAP Tuesday announced a partnership to integrate, certify and support their respective security and identity technology and governance, risk and compliance software.

Security

Novell support can be found in the new EVault and Sentinel is mentioned in the context of this Webinar.

Most recently, Dave served as the vice president of product management at e-Security, where he was instrumental in orchestrating the overhaul of the flagship Sentinel(TM) product, helping drive more than 50 percent annual growth leading to the company’s $72M acquisition by Novell.

Nothing too special here.

People

There is a lot of stuff about Novell certifications, including this bit from the news:

In 1996 he earned certification as a Novell Administrator. He is presently enrolled in doctoral classes in distance education at the University of Texas at Tyler.

Eric Schmidt’s Novell roots were mentioned in the New York Times and a man who worked for Schmidt at Novell has this to say:

The company I hitched my horse to back then was Novell. It was run by a gentleman named Eric Schmidt. Yep, same guy who is now the CEO of Google. He took Novell to places it hadn’t seen before his arrival and we are seeing much the same with Google. When he got there it was google.com and not much else.

More on people with roots at Novell:

1. The joy, and pain, of documentation

But then I met my match with Novell Netware 3.11’s documentation. It comprised dozens of manuals that took up an entire shelf. Alas, apart from one lonely spiral bound reference booklet, it seemed to be free of any useful content. It proved to be an early example of what documentation would become — an exercise of quantity over quality.

2. EPIC Ventures and Zions Bank Venture Funds Name Christopher Stone Managing Director

Stone is best known for creating the organization and specification for the industry software standard called CORBA; he was an advocate and leader in the open source software movement, as well as Executive Vice President and Vice Chairman/Office of the CEO of Novell.

The session that Sys-Con advertises will be manned by the following individual:

Dipto Chakravarty is the Vice President of Worldwide Engineering for Novell’s Identity and Security business unit.

More new sightings:

He installed the first Novell network in Tokyo, and in 1995 sold the business to computer services giant EDS.

Partners

On the collaboration and partnership side, we have found the following about Novell:

i. Express Data adds business development staff

Express Data is also planning to add another two staff across Cisco and Novell before Christmas, Logan-Bell said, and was keen to look for another 2-4 people after January for the distributor’s more recent vendor signings.

ii. Open Channel Solutions to distribute Vasco

IT distributor, Open Channel Solutions (OCS), has signed an agreement with security vendor, Vasco Data Security International.

[...]

“The other thing that attracted us was they were a really nice fit with Novell solutions. Our company typically looks at technology that fits around the Novell ecosystem.”

iii. Disk Controller Failure is Evident and Cause Data Loss

The company provide Undelete software for Windows, Mac OS X, UNIX, Linux and Novell operating systems.

iv. Xepa introduces Cyberoam for SME threat management

He notes that the Cyberoam devices tie in with Novell Directory Services or Microsoft Active Directory to provide the capability to limit user activity on the Internet with full reporting. “A built in bandwidth manager provides for bandwidth allocation and the setting of policies to limit Internet use. In the target market for the solutions, this is a valuable feature, as for these types of organisations, bandwidth is an expensive commodity.”

Novell was also mentioned in press releases of other companies that
work with it. Training for Novell is evidently not dead yet, not as long as Novell has “legacy” products and more marketing material. █

–Steve Winfield, Microsoft

Summary: Microsoft’s on-line business declines and VMware comes over to Washington, Microsoft’s home state

Microsoft’s latest efforts in search have gone nowhere — and fast! For the second time in one week [1, 2], a Microsoft-independent survey suggests (essentially corroborates) that Microsoft’s search is on the decline in the US. Even the Bing-sponsored blog has covered these findings:

The report found that Bing’s percentage of searches actually dropped by five percent during the month of September to 8.96 percent of all searches. Google, by comparison, gained one percent to 71.08 percent of all searches. (Chart below).

Once again they ignore the world. They treat the United States as though it’s representative of world trends at large. If Microsoft is going downwards, need it build any additional datacentres to cope with decreased demand?

While Microsoft builds search/SaaS datacentres at strategic locations [1, 2], so does VMware (the company which comes from Palo Alto, California) after getting more or less hijacked by Microsoft employees [1, 2, 3]. The same site (as above) covers this:

Given all of the former Microsoft executives now working at VMware, we’ve joked in the past that the Silicon Valley virtualization powerhouse might just want to consider setting up a new headquarters in the Seattle area. Well, it’s not quite the headquarters. And it is not quite Seattle. But VMware has chosen Washington — specifically East Wenatchee — for its latest and greatest data center.

VMware — led by former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz…

Another virtualisation company that Microsoft had captured from the inside followed the same trajectory. XenSource opened a facility next to Microsoft just before it was acquired by Microsoft’s partner of the year, Citrix, and after it had received funds from former Microsoft employees. It had also made a Microsoft employee its general manager.

Microsoft and its former employees are seemingly trying to buy and assimilate the entire market, including Microsoft’s competitors. It’s not necessarily deliberate, i.e. it is not intended to happen by design. But friends help friends and former colleagues. That’s just human nature; people — unlike robots — have no magic switch in their brain that flips over loyalties overnight. For instance, also see what Microsoft did to Yahoo!, Corel, Novell, and Borland. People must never forget that Novell’s management now has former Microsoft executives in it (recent examples include the board level). Novell is likely to get acquired. █

“Ask the partner to give you heads up on customer situations – bribe them!”

–Steve Winfield, Microsoft

Summary: VMware shows signs of Linux neglect, just like Xen after receiving funding, staff and acquisition from Microsoft-tied entities

VMware is run by Microsoft veterans after aggressive intervention and this causes real trouble. Joining the Linux Foundation was a cheap (as in relatively inexpensive) public relations move for VMware; judging by its actions, it’s not serious about the platform anymore. From the news:

VMware drags its feet on Linux-based vCenter appliance, annoys Linux users

The vCenter virtual appliance server 2.5 has been available as a free technology preview since late February. The cross-platform client interface is still in development but some components have been available in technology preview since May, with no word on how long users will have to wait for a full production release of either product. All of that doesn’t sit well with some people.

Eric Siebert, a TechTarget blogger and IT veteran, said he thinks VMware may have been dragging its feet a bit on this project because its customer base is predominately Windows. But VMware needs to step up its Linux efforts if it wants to compete with Xen and Hyper-V for Linux users, he said.

Why is this happening? Is Microsoft using Maritz and his other Microsoft colleagues as what it calls “insider friend, ‘the Fox’” or is this neglect simply part of the company’s overall weakness?

VMware — being part of EMC — is Microsoft Partner of the Year 2008 and so is Citrix/Xen, whose role has become Microsoft centered.

Another one of Microsoft’s suspicious ‘puppets’ is Yahoo!

It truly shows now that Yahoo! joins Microsoft's action against Google in books and now that Yahoo acquires Maktoob. Guess who it may be piggybacking?

Yahoo Acquires Arab Portal, Bing Gets Backdoor Into Deal

[...]

This morning Yahoo announced that it was acquiring Maktoob.com, “the leading online community in the Arab world.” According to Yahoo the site has an audience of 16.5 million people. The purchase price has been estimated at between $75 and $100 million and was apparently in the works before the search deal with Microsoft was announced last month. Yahoo said the acquisition is part of a larger strategy to grow its audience in emerging markets and become the “destination of choice” in those locations.

It is reasonable to treat Yahoo! almost like a subsidiary of Microsoft in particular areas. As we have seen before, Microsoft may also use its partners to acquire other companies for competitive reasons. This is sad. █

Summary: Novell does not eat its own dog food and Mono is still negligible

Moonlight has made some headlines recently [1, 2] because of a new beta which is hardly worthy of news coverage. As ITWire points out, even Novell continues to show a lack of demand for it. It goes further than this:

If Moonlight is so hot, why isn’t Novell using it?

[...]

Novell’s lack of trust in its own products seems to extend to its Netware and Linux products to some extent as well.

According to Netcraft, the Novell websites run a mix of Windows Server 2003, CentOS, Debian GNU/Linux, Netware, SUSE and Solaris.

It is not exactly news that several of Novell’s Web sites did not use SUSE; some used the products of a direct competitor. We wrote about it years ago.

Speaking of scarcity in terms of demand for Moonlight, watch how little developer interest there is in C# or Mono, at least in the Free software world. Mono proponents love to pretend that Mono is vital owing to developers’ preferences, but the facts just don’t add up or stack up. Like its ally Microsoft, Novell exaggerates using perceived demand that they hope will be self-fulfilling.

C# Open Source popularity not what one might think.

How does one measure success?

The success – roughly defined as “popularity” – of C#/Mono/.NET is something we’ve kicked around in comments here. Now, there are numbers from Black Duck that have got some blogs picking up on some “harder” numbers.

C# squeaks into 10th place, with a 1.24% share – virtually equal to assembly language (1.23%)!

It ought to be emphasised that these numbers from Black Duck are skewed because it recently started funneling in heaps of Microsoft-oreinted projects, which then gave the impression of (relatively) less GPL acceptance and probably increased acceptance of C#. If only GPL-licensed projects are accounted for, it is likely that C# will have closer to 0%. This cannot be checked, however, because Black Duck insists on black-box surveys and proprietary scanning/cataloging software. As one reader often reminds us, Mono/C# programmers are only dozens of people, many of whom are Novell employees.

Over at The Register, Timothy Prickett Morgan seemingly advises Novell to join forces with Microsoft’s Partner of the Year (2008), namely Citrix.

What is commercial Linux distributor Novell going to do about server and desktop virtualization?

It’s a good question, and one that the company’s top brass has not really addressed.

In July 2006, with the launch of SUSE Linux 10, Novell was the first commercial Linux vendor to ship a Xen hypervisor tuned for Linux. And it is arguable that Novell probably jumped the gun, given the state of Xen, its management tools, and Novell’s support of other operating systems beside SLES 10 at the time with its embedded Xen product.

[...]

Circling high above the server virtualization space here at El Reg, it sure looks like Novell and Citrix need each other. They need each other as much as Citrix needed to closely ally itself with Microsoft to put out its Essentials tools for managing both XenServer and Hyper-V hypervisors, and as much as Novell needed to make a pact with Microsoft to distribute $340m worth of SUSE Linux support contracts into Windows shops.

If Novell and Citrix grew even closer, it would most likely lead to even greater entanglements with Microsoft. Citrix is no friend of GNU/Linux, to say the very, very least. █

Summary: Even the yellow press misses the historical record of Icahn’s role

According to news reports, Microsoft and Yahoo! are still talking.

The talks between the two have been continuing off and on since earlier this year, after Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s new chief executive, responded to Microsoft’s repeated overtures for discussions.

Reuters shows that one prominent advocate of a deal is one whom we suspected and considered to be a Microsoft "proxy fighter" that the press spoke about (the press openly spoke about “proxy fight” over Yahoo!).

Yahoo board member Icahn wants Microsoft deal

[...]

Icahn declined to comment on the state of any negotiations between Yahoo and Microsoft. He had tried to broker a partnership between the two companies last year, when talks on Microsoft’s $47.5 billion takeover bid for Yahoo fell apart.

“I’ve been a strong advocate of getting a search deal done with Microsoft,” Icahn, who owns about 5 percent of Yahoo and is a director on its board, told Reuters on Friday.

He also put friends of his on the board, so his influence there may be greater than 5%. For a bit of history also see:

• Microsoft Fires Up Proxy War Against Yahoo as Debt Looms Over
• King of Hypocrisy(ahoo!)
• Microsoft Fight Against Yahoo Board Gets Uglier
• Microsoft’s Proxy Fight May Have Begun Weeks Ago, Quietly
• Microsoft’s Latest Ugly Tactics Against Google, Yahoo, and VMware
• As Yahoo Proxy War Looms, VMWare and Nokia Return to One’s Mind
• Microsoft Executives Penetrate Corel, Yahoo; Is Novell Next?
• What if Microsoft Owned Yahoo (and the US Government Establishments’ IT)?
• LawMedia Group May be Another Confirmed Microsoft AstroTurfing Agency
• Microsoft Executives Land Inside Microsoft Rivals
• Update on the Microsoft/Yahoo Situation: Google-Yahoo Alliance?
• Microsoft: 800 lb. Guerrilla
• Who’s Bugging Google and Apple? (Updatedx2)
• Video: Bloomberg on Yahoo/Google/Microsoft
• Eye on Microsoft: Windows Under Attack from Critics, Cyber Criminals; Yahoo! Besieged by Microsoft
• The Microsoft-Influenced US Regulators Wrong on Yahoo!
• Microsoft Hijacked Yahoo! from the Inside (Updated)
• Newly-Appointed Yahoo Puppet: Let Microsoft Have Us

There is nothing final or concrete to indicates a Yahoo!-Microsoft deal materialising, which would show sheer hypocrisy because Microsoft blocked a similar Yahoo!-Google deal. This would prove cheaper than a full acquisition, that’s for sure. Speaking of which, there is one writer with the opinion that Microsoft should buy Citrix.

Why Microsoft Should Finally Buy Citrix

I’ve written a good bit here about the various ways Microsoft and Citrix overlap in the hypervisor space, ranging from topics like shared code base through competition for the desktop space.

[...]

To be clear, I am not being critical of Microsoft technologies or business practices (as any long-time readers of my blog will undoubtedly know). I am suggesting that when compared on a chart, Citrix is closer today to where the market and VMware are going for virtual platforms, and if the goal is to compete with VMware for both enterprise and cloud virtual platforms then Microsoft could benefit in leaps and bounds by acquiring Citrix for both Xen and their networking products. Microsoft would get virtual platform, application, and networking tools that they don’t have today.

Microsoft might not need Xen all that much. Microsoft has just released a new Linux patch to advance Hyper-V. While it is commendable that Microsoft is no longer entirely allergic to the GPL(v2, not v3), it ought to be strongly emphasised that this is the latest example (amongst others) where Microsoft submits an open source patch from which Microsoft Windows or another part of the proprietary Microsoft stack is to gain. Prior such examples were beneficial to SQL Server, for example. I would be more delighted if Microsoft decided to rescind its patent threats, which it uses to suppress adoption of the very same kernel it purports to be contributing to. The accompanying press release is sign that Microsoft also uses this as a publicity stunt — selling people the impression it needs for all sorts of reasons. We shall write about this later. █

Summary: Bits from the press about Novell and virtualisation for the most part

MANY people may not remember this, but Ron Hovsepian admitted giving power to Microsoft in the datacentres. It was part of the deal that Novell should permit Windows to run as a host and SUSE usually be a guest. Novell was the feeble party in this relationship and by signing that notorious patent deal, Novell sort of passed its inferiority onto other GNU/Linux distributors.

Moreover, it cannot be stressed strongly enough that Citrix bought XenSource only to advance Windows for the most part. Here is a new article from The Register:

Citrix Systems and Microsoft are co-mingling some of their virtual desktop technologies. But Redmond stopped short of endorsing the XenClient bare-metal PC hypervisor that chip maker Intel and Citrix are working on for delivery later this year.

Also new from The Register is an article about FastScales:

Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is not yet supported, and neither are other hypervisors, such as XenServer from Citrix Systems or Hyper-V from Microsoft, and this could be a problem. FastScale said back in April – when VMware launched its ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor and its related vSphere 4.0 tools – that it would support these by the end of the year.

Here is the Boston press about Novell:

Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland, Wash., firm that specializes in tracking Microsoft, said that by creating a rival operating system, Google is leading with its chin.

“I don’t see why Google has to get into this business,’’ Rosoff said. “It seems like they’re waving a red flag directly at Microsoft’s core business.’’

Microsoft has crushed a host of erstwhile technology titans that posed similar head-on threats – browser maker Netscape and networking software company Novell Inc., for example, he said.

Matt Rosoff would be biased because of his professional focus and location (Kirkland, just like Gates), so by “crushed” he probably means broke the law to put competitors out of business and thus obtain a monopoly, then pay fines for the crimes and benefit from the outcome of the crime (financially) over the years. The article above is noteworthy because of another new article (from Alibaba) about VMware and Microsoft. Microsoft executives are pretty much running VMware right now. The article states:

But Maritz knew how to play hardball: He made decisions that helped vanquish past Microsoft rivals, including Lotus, Novell and Netscape.

“Play hardball” or break the law? How the press attempts to soften the seriousness of crimes over time. We see it constantly, even days ago. As Comes vs Microsoft exhibits show, Paul Maritz participated even in vandalism. There are many more examples, some of which are yet to come. █

“We are going to cut off their air supply.”

–Paul Maritz, former Microsoft Vice President, referring to Netscape

Summary: Novell sidles with Microsoft’s end of the spectrum and Gartner promotes Hyper-V by comparing VMware to Novell

MICROSOFT HAS ALREADY used up most of its ‘puppets’ in order to attack VMware and advance Hyper-V. It used the Burton Group, which needed to be asked for an apology in some other circumstances. It also used the Yankee Group, which was soon forced to pull what seemed like a result of the usual fraudulent study methodologies [1, 2]. Then there was IDC versus VMware. The only pro-Microsoft analyst which has been conspicuously absent from this slog was the Gartner Group [1, 2]… until now. It is now Gartner’s turn to take shots at VMware. Gartner’s David Cappuccio published this article in the Indian press and his own turf. Characteristically enough, he too is totally ignoring anyone but Microsoft, pretending it is just Microsoft’s game. It is a familiar pattern of promotion through deception.

Matt Asay falls into this trap and spreads the word further in a blog about “open source”.

Could VMware be the next Novell? That’s the question Gartner managing vice president and chief of research for Infrastructure David Cappuccio asks in a provocative post, one that bears further discussion. While VMware is at the top of its game, there are several historical analogs between VMware and Novell.

A Citrix veteran pushed out there not one but two articles that give magnitude to this Microsoft promotion from Gartner:

First: “Gartner Wonders; Will VMware become the next Novell?”

Back in the early 1990’s Novel owned the local area network market – they were as dominant as VMware is today with well over 90% of the market and had an incredibly loyal following (I can attest to this having attended multiple Brainshare events with 10,000+ attendees – and I have the t-shirts to prove it).

Second: “Is VMware More Like Novell or Oracle?”

Unlike Noorda’s Novell, VMware’s CEO, COO and Executive VP all come from high-level positions at Microsoft. They understand the Microsoft culture, strengths and threat. VMware is a company with a laser beam focus on virtualization that is undistracted by a personal vendetta.

They are giving Microsoft credit (only Microsoft), not to KVM, for example, despite the fact that it runs/will run on many Red Hat (and generally GNU/Linux) servers out there.

And then there is Citrix, which is all about Windows and Microsoft. Yes, it truly shows. From The Register:

It will launch a freebie version of its Citrix Essentials virtualisation tool set that works in conjunction with Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor for Windows Server 2008.

This whole article shows the bias at Citrix (just Hyper-V/Xen and Microsoft/Novell). Linux is hardly a consideration after Citrix hijacked Xen. The Linux Foundation appears to have noticed that too. In another article from the The Register, it is shown that Novell chooses to help Microsoft and its semi-subsidiary Citrix. Novell will not help KVM, which competes directly with Microsoft, the Microsoft-influenced Citrix, and the Microsoft-dominated VMware (after Tucci’s aggressive transitioning).

SUSE Linux 11 has a technology preview of Red Hat’s alternative KVM hypervisor, but Novell is still pretty cool to it, having made big investments in Xen. “We don’t see an ecosystem developing around KVM yet,” says Steinman dismissively. But when Red Hat gets its freestanding version of KVM, called Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, or RHEV for short, out of beta and into production later this year, Novell will have to make up its mind what to do. Red Hat already has, and Xen is not its future.

Novell finds itself stuck with Microsoft. It is obliged to keep Microsoft happy in order to receive those cash infusions, without which it probably could not survive. █

Summary: Microsoft-tied entities brushing shoulders amongst people in the Free(dom) software world

“Microsoft” is not a company, it is an ecosystem. It is a network of connected businesses that share the same goals and thus help one another. The role of Citrix is clear to see based on the XenSource story. The short story is that Citrix took Xen away from GNU/Linux, which is gradually gravitating towards KVM, probably as a direct result. Unsurprisingly, one of the only remaining supporters of Xen in the enterprise-oriented space is Novell, which is part of Microsoft's linked interests.

As we pointed out several days ago, an investment from Citrix in Vyatta may be cause for concern [1, 2]. On the surface, it sure seems rather innocent and virtualisation guru Dan Kusnetzky opines that this may be a strategic move against Cisco (Cisco and Microsoft don't get along so well anymore).

Dell, HP, IBM are you watching? I believe you would gain some important ground in your emerging competition with Cisco by also becoming buddies with Vyatta.

Dana Blankenhorn believes that “It’s a delicate dance, especially at times like this when growth capital is so scarce. Time will tell whether Vyatta tilts toward, say, Xen in helping craft customer solutions. Or whether it starts pushing Novell’s Suse Linux over, say, Red Hat.”

Considering the fact that Microsoft promotes SUSE and vilifies Red Hat, how likely is it that some gentle pressure might come from Citrix so that Vyatta leans towards Microsoft’s patent ploy? This hopefully will never happen.

Moving on a little, last month we noted that Black Duck (created by a Microsoft employee, who is still on the Board of Directors along with Roger Heinen from Microsoft) had invited Microsoft to FOSS ‘on our behalf’ [1, 2]. It is almost as though they act as a gateway. Gavin Clarke, a Microsoft spinner/PR person for the most part, passes on Black Duck’s latest praise of Microsoft:

A home-cooked Microsoft license has carved out a small but growing following among the open-source community in less than two years.

[...]

That’s according to license and code watcher Black Duck Software, who attributed the rise in MS-PL to Microsoft’s efforts to increase the appeal of its CodePlex project-hosting site. MS-PL is one of 1,577 software licenses from 200,000 projects analyzed by Black Duck.

It is important to be reminded that these are licences whose goal is to attack Free software and give Microsoft greater control over a much more confused and diluted 'community' (of Windows developers who give their code away for free).

“It is very dangerous to allow Black Duck to become (or be perceived as) a sort of spokesman for “open source”.”It is also important to remember that Black Duck is a proprietary software company (and marketing puppet at times, for press exposure that leads to shameless self-promotion). Black Duck talks a lot about “open source ” while selling proprietary software and nothing which is Free (libre) software at all, not to mention Black Duck’s ripoff of Palamida’s good *GPLv3 database (but that’s old news).

It is disappointing to see Matt Asay parroting a message of this company which ushers Microsoft into embrace & extend of “open source”. There is more in SD Times, following another Black Duck press release about open source in healthcare last week.

It is very dangerous to allow Black Duck to become (or be perceived as) a sort of spokesman for “open source”. But some people allow this to happen, not just Microsoft proponents with prominent positions in the press. █