Summary: Novell's emphasis on "Cloud Computing" (a better name would be Fog Computing) is noted now that assets in the form of staff and copyrights are being passed to AttachMSFT [sic]

The only thing worse than proprietary software is proprietary software behind a so-called 'cloud' (Fog Computing). The user gets access to neither the code nor the binaries, as Dr. Stallman pointed out quite eloquently earlier in the year. For quite some time it has been acknowledged that Novell moved further away from free/open source software. We see it in the latest new products which also include Log Manager. Over in YouTube, new videos are promoting this section of Novell's proprietary software [1, 2], even in foreign-as-in-non-English languages (many videos uploaded by NovellItalia, e.g. this one in Italian).

What is important to point out is that in Fog Computing too Novell does almost everything the proprietary way. Not only does Novell help companies take away control from users but it also takes away control from these companies. The users are therefore becoming hostages of both Novell and the company which operates Novell servers, including servers running SUSE for instance. One example of Novell's proprietary software in this area would be PlateSpin, which has this new video about it.



There is also a new video about PlateSpin Recon and IWM (in German). Dipto Chakravarty speaks about logging from Fog Computing and it's just one video example among other new examples (e.g. this video from Messaging Architects, a Novell partner). These are all proprietary and they make Fog Computing exceedingly risky. "It is very possible, then, that cloud management could quickly become the primary function of the CIO at many top organizations, according to Novell's Benjamin Grubin," claims this new article. Well, then why fall into a proprietary trap then? Red Hat offers similar functionality which is free/open source software.

“Red Hat offers similar functionality which is free/open source software.”Watch Novell coming out with some new Fog Computing propaganda. There is a new so-called 'survey', but upon closer inspection it's just more marketing. "The survey [is] sponsored by Novell," says this page, but a lot of articles quote it as though it's a reliable reference, e.g. [1, 2]. To quote just this one example: "But according to a recent survey from Novell, half of businesses still see the state of cloud computing security as a barrier to adoption, and 81 percent have compliance-related concerns over storing data in the cloud."

Some new "research" (opinion) on McAfee and Novell gets titled "Security and Services Take to the Clouds" and Novell "Receives Honors in First Annual HPC in the Cloud Editors' Choice Awards" (also covered here in the form of a press release pushed by Novell's deception professionals)

There is this new article from The H which mentions Novell and it is titled "Processor Whispers: About Clouds and Fogs". Another new article which mentions Novell is titled "Dell's cloud strategy: Do-it-yourself private clouds".

Almost everywhere you look at Novell these days (even in Linux events) you find Fog Computing and it is done the proprietary way, even though Novell does not mention this. The company does not care about software freedom and neither will AttachMSFT. It's just another trouble in the making. It would be wise to abandon Novell now. ⬆