Summary: Novell picks up Intel's work

A REGULAR reader has told us that "Novell backs Moblin 2.0 mobile Linux distro," pointing to one article from The Register. This seems awfully familiar and The Register seems to be neglecting any criticism.

Quoting from the article, "Despite its Ubuntu and Fedora heritage, Novell seems to be thrilled to be backing Moblin 2.0, which Guy Lunardi, director of client preloads at the commercial Linux distributor, says will be announced as an alpha today and which is expected to begin a normal beta testing schedule in a few weeks..."

Our reader asks, "Will this version come without the Microsoft patent pledge and why isn't Intel scared of violating anyone's IP?

“This seems awfully familiar and The Register seems to be neglecting any criticism.”"Wait," he says "I spoke too soon," quoting further from The Register:

"Novell is now contributing code to the Moblin project, adding in code for windowing, email and media management from its openSUSE development project..."

Our readers remarks: "Given the virtual stagnation in deployment of openSUSE and the laying off of some staff, wouldn't Novell have been better served if they had created their own Moblin type project and launched that on the low-powered mobile market? Instead of advertising their competitor's products on its own web site!" Novell's direction with GNU/Linux is iffy because it shifts staff to Taiwan.

Quoting further, the reader picks this summary: "the Linux Foundation [...] took over the steerage of the Moblin project from Intel earlier this month [...] The chip maker has figured out that it is difficult to get [...] OEMs [...] to back a project when it is vendor controlled."

This news was also covered in Ziff Davis and its sibling ZDNet.

As part of the agreement with Intel and Moblin.org, Novell will establish a Novell Open Labs group in Taiwan "to foster the adoption of Moblin," says the company. Novell also plans to work with the Taiwan Moblin Enabling Center (MEC), a joint venture between Intel and the the Taiwan Institute for Information Industry. Novell says it will join MEC's efforts to validate designs for Moblin compliance.

The Linux Foundation's choice of OBS is part of a troubling trend that illustrates Novell's impact in there. ⬆

"Our partnership with Microsoft continues to expand."

--Ron Hovsepian, Novell CEO