The lizard is being locked inside a box

Summary: Novell's focus is increasingly on proprietary software and as far as SUSE goes, Novell only adds to it more of a Fog Computing aspect

Eric Savitz, a longtime booster of Microsoft, seems to be urging Novell to give in to the Microsoft executives who run VMB_ware and just sell SUSE to them. A couple of days ago he published "Something’s Got To Give" where he says: "Since March, the company has been considering strategic alternatives; the Street expects a resolution of the situation soon. The Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago reported that the company was talking to VMware (VMW), among others, about buying the company’s SuSE Linux business; but Reuters subsequently reported that private equity buyers were balking over the price the company was asking for the rest of its assets."

“The sad thing about Novell is that before signing the software patents deal with Microsoft there was a good deal of commitment to Free software, with nice innovative projects like Compiz.”Novell keeps losing value as more major contracts are being lost and the stock declined quite a bit in recent days (see financial news about Novell in [1, 2, 3, 4]).

The sad thing about Novell is that before signing the software patents deal with Microsoft there was a good deal of commitment to Free software, with nice innovative projects like Compiz. These days Novell seems to be focusing on virtualisation for Fog Computing, with examples in the press such as this new article about "Intelligent Workload Management" (proprietary).

This is a guest post by Mark Oldroyd, a senior technology identity and security specialist with Novell.

Here is another new press release which is about ZENworks and obviously just proprietary software:

GroupLink Corporation, makers of the first and only ZENWorks 10 integrated service desk, the everything HelpDesk (eHD), announces its commitment to further integration with ZENworks 11.

Novell is even turning its SUSE component into a Fog Computing thing, according to this new press release which generated coverage in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. In short, SUSE is being refocused by Novell so as to take further control away from users. How on Earth is that a step forward? Some of Novell's pro-software freedom people have quit the company and it shows.

According to this guest commentary from The H, "Open Core is over" ('open' core is an "open source" marketing gown for proprietary software). Here is the part about Novell:

"Open core" always used to be the problem with SUSE (proprietary Yast) and, since the take-over by Novell, the company's proprietary components have been called eDirectory or Groupwise. Red Hat with its "perceived" 99% of open source components has been considerably more successful. As correctly pointed out in the article, people quickly realise that "open core" doesn't actually represent an advantage, and our company also encountered the described "dialectic problems" before we made the decision to release our software as 100% open source code.

The SUSE Studio blog writes about One-click WebYaST. Is that too being 'foggified'?

Anyway, in other news there is this deceiving new headline from South Africa. What it says is not news at all as Novell announced this months ago. It's an attempt to grab Solaris users and put them on Microsoft/Novell Ballnux instead (paying Microsoft and Novell for a patents-encumbered distribution). SAP too loves Ballnux and here is one more article about Novell's renewed vows with SAP (a lot about it was published last week):

There was a little blurb on internet.com a couple of days ago mentioning that Novell would be optimizing the SUSE Linux OS for SAP applications.

[...]

This feels right considering that Elliott Associates, a Waltham, Mass-based Hedge Fund, made an offer to buy Novell back in March. The offer was rejected. An optimized Linux enterprise server for SAP applications will benefit the new SUSE Linux owner, whoever that may be. I will be sad to see an independent Novell go the way of so many other enterprise software vendors… how Darwinian eh?

The proprietary software giants just love Ballnux because it gives them that warm fuzzy feeling that even "open source" is living under the rules of proprietary software legacy, including software patent monopolies.

Novell's "governance suite" (more proprietary software) is covered here in the South African press and Amazon -- another proprietary software giant which pays Microsoft for GNU/Linux since many Microsoft executives were appointed to its management -- finds a place for Ballnux at sight of the aforementioned announcement from Novell.

Watch the latest publicity stunt which Novell uses to promote Ballnux, in line with the announcement above:

Novell today announced the judging panel for the First Annual aEURoeDisteraEUR Awards, a SUSE Studio contest celebrating innovators and inventors of Linux-based software appliances. Industry luminaries from Computerworld, eWeek, the Linux Foundation, openSUSE and Novell, will select and award each winner in the categories of aEURoeCommunity UseaEUR and aEURoeCommercial UseaEUR a $10,000 grand prize. In addition, due to unprecedented interest in the competition, Novell has extended the submission deadline to Nov. 1, 2010.

This says that it's about the "Annual aEURoeDisteraEUR Awards Celebrating Linux Innovators", but only Ballnux is mentioned there, not GNU/Linux. Shameful marketing from Novell? Here is Novell's head of marketing (John Dragoon) saying in the PR blog that "Silence is not Goal(den)". Well, maybe it's time for Novell not to keep silent about its shameless attempts to stomp on competing distributions that give Novell code (primarily Red Hat, which is still the only other option in many cases). Dragoon writes:

Keeping your goals to yourself can apparently help you train for marathons and shrink dress sizes. It will not help you achieve your goals as a department or a company.

Well, Novell will soon be sold to one company or another. Dragoon and Hovsepian are almost the only top chiefs that seem to have stuck with the company to this point. They don't know a darn thing about software freedom; they never knew nor cared, otherwise they would have written on the subject. So here we have Novell going back to its proprietary software days. SUSE too may soon be sold to a proprietary software powerhouse. ⬆