Bonum Certa Men Certa

Novell is Not an Open Source Company and Neither is AttachMSFT

Abstract shapes



Summary: Setting the record straight on the nature of Novell's business based on some very recent news

AN article that caught our eyes the other day labels Novell an "open source company". Well, even Novell does not pretend to be an open source company, it calls itself a "mixed source" company. Watch the discussion where Matt Aslett corrects this:



With just under 1,600 combined customers and revenues that doubled in the last year, de Montcheuil claims that the combined company will be the fifth-largest open source company, following Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL), Sourcefire (NASDAQ: FIRE) and Ingres.

451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett said the company "may well be there or thereabouts; depends on how you cut the numbers."

"You have to decide where to draw the line on 'pure play,'" Aslett told eCRM Guide. "For example, we would not count Novell. Although they do break out figures for the Linux business, if you include that you could also include a company like Actuate [$18 million in BIRT-related business last year] and then you might as well include IBM or Oracle.


The truth of the matter is, almost everything which Novell does these days is proprietary. We wrote many posts to illustrate this. Novell's PR people are still clinging onto corruptible yardsticks like the so-called 'Magic Quadrant' which the Gartner Group uses to make companies pay for Gartner contracts, according to numerous allegations. Needless to say, it's usually proprietary software whose owner pays Gartner that makes it into the Magic Quadrant. Gartner was even sued for it. Anyway, looking at the remainder of the Novell headlines, Novell's BSM (business service management) product has an announcement to make just before the sale of the company (rushed disclosure of products before AttachMSFT [sic] comes).

Here is an announcement of a Novell partnership [1, 2, 3], which is further explained in "New Version of SAPERION’s ECM and BPM Suite Successfully Merges Compliance With User Friendliness; Joint Solution With Novell Provides Collaboration, Compliance, and Revision-Proof Archiving" (Guess what? That's proprietary too).

Novell SecureLogin gets this security product attached to it:

To address market demand for strong authentication support for Identity and Access Management solutions, Authasas€® now offers full support for strong authentication to Novell€® SecureLogin.


Novell gets mentioned among other companies in all sorts of lists including this one:

As this step becomes more complex, a commercial enterprise access governance tool -- such as Aveksa Inc.'s Access Certification, Oracle Corp.'s Oracle Identity Analytics, Novell Inc.'s Access Governance Suite, etc. -- is needed to perform this activity.


There is also this report from New Zealand about a school that looks for change, including the possibility or replacing Novell's proprietary stack (now is a likely time for it to happen).

The Ministry has contracts in place with Renaissance, Novell and Datacom for software licensing and support for Apple, Novell, Symantec and Microsoft technology, and with Telecom, Watchdog and Websense for web filtering and firewalls.


Back in 2005-2006 Novell had a lot of SUSE news to share. Now it's just a proprietary company, so passing of this company to AttachMSFT is not a major loss. The free/libre (or open source) community will do fine without Novell.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Michael “Monty” Widenius: It Started in 1983 With Richard Stallman (RMS)
The other co-founder of MySQL is a bit notorious for confronting RMS rather viciously
For the Second Time in a Few Weeks Microsoft Lunduke Makes False Accusations Against Senior Red Hat Staff to Incite a Despicable 'Troll Army'
Nothing that Microsoft Lunduke claims of says can be trusted
 
Links 03/10/2025: Lawyers Caught Using LLM Slop Explain Why They Did It, LibreSSL 4.1.1 and 4.0.1 Released
Links for the day
FSF Board Grew 50% Since Last Year, Has New President, Turns 40 in Two Days
It's a good move for the FSF and - by extension - for software freedom
Links 03/10/2025: Conflicts, Death of TypePad, and TikTok/CheeTok Gives a Boost to Far Right Groups in Europe
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 02, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 02, 2025
Slopwatch: Linux Journal, Google News, and LinuxSecurity
They carry on polluting the Web with fake articles
Gemini Links 02/10/2025: Kubernetes With FreeBSD and robots.txt
Links for the day
Links 02/10/2025: 'Open' 'AI' Resorting to Gimmicks and Fake Funding, Europe’s ‘Drone Wall’ Discussed
Links for the day
Links 02/10/2025: Brave Passes 100M Users Milestone, Kodak Selling Its Own Film Again
Links for the day
su lisa && rm -rf /home/ibm/power
Novell was ruined by another person from IBM, Ronald Hovsepian
A Record Demand at Microsoft: Demand to Cancel
What we're witnessing is a very ungraceful destruction of XBox
Microsoft is Losing Europe
Hence all the "support" and "discount" offers that are limited to Europe
The Free Software Foundation Starts Fund-raising for 40th Anniversary
New pop-up 2-3 days ahead of the 40th anniversary event
Systemd Breaks Networking in Debian and Microsoft Staff Rushes to Make Face-Saving Excuses in LWN
Microsoft's bluca is already there in the comments, his Microsoft money pays for LWN to let him leave comments early
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 01, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, October 01, 2025
What the End of XBox Will Look Like: a Fiery Crash
XBox is the next Skype. It won't last much longer. Expect many more layoffs.
Richard Stallman is Going to Finland to Give a Talk Next Thursday
A day later he speaks in Sweden
Gemini Links 02/10/2025: SMTP Pipelining and End of ROOPHLOCH 2025
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Plagiarism, Fake Articles, and FUD About Linux
not a day goes by without Google News feeding FUD from slopfarms
Gemini Links 01/10/2025: Chat Control and End of Life
Links for the day
Links 01/10/2025: Long Covid Risk Reiterated, "Bitcoin Queen" Caught
Links for the day
Links 01/10/2025: EA $55 Billion Deal is Debt and Slop "Raises Vishing Risks"
Links for the day
Bluewashing at Red Hat Means Redundancies
The man who sold Red Hat to IBM meanwhile became a Microsoft Mono booster
After Killing OpenSource.com, IBM ('Red Hat') and OSI Told Us OpenSource.net Would Replace It (But That Didn't Happen)
Now it's time to move on, perhaps tarnishing the "Open Source" label some more (for whatever sponsor wants this)
Linux is Not a Community Project, It's a Wall Street Product
The core goal should be freedom
Bad Actors Abusing the Free Software Community, Vandalising It Using Rogue Politics and Old Tactics
Oil giants have long attempted to do this; now, the digital equivalent of Big Oil does this in technology
Social Control Media Isn't the Future, The Federation or Fediverse Isn't Growing, People's Accounts Vanish for Good
users' accounts will get deleted, not just become inactive
IBM is Failing, This Helps Show Wall Street is Entirely Detached From Actual Commercial Performance
IBM is unable to grow, it's just constantly shrinking
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 30, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, September 30, 2025
Clerical Aspects of Publishing and Development
In Free software, the management aspects are considerably reduced
Slopwatch: Fake Articles and Google News Promoting "Linux" Spam or Bot-Generated Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD)
These slopfarms help misplace blame
Third Wave of Microsoft Layoffs in September, This Time Many in Liverpool Affected
Be ready for more waves of layoffs ahead of the so-called "results" in late October