Having Added Mono and OOXML to OpenOffice.org, Novell Wants to Cash in and Give Patents to Microsoft

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2011-04-21 18:10:12 UTC
Modified: 2011-04-21 18:10:12 UTC

Summary: Novell may be days away from approval of being acquired by AttachMSFT and passing almost 1,000 patents to Microsoft; in the mean time, Novell wants to monetise the project it polluted, forked, and to some extent wrecked

NOVELL is a proprietary software company which thinks like a proprietary software company but markets itself as an open source software company or a "Linux company". Some journalists fall for it and propagate the illusion, even though Novell's contributions to OpenOffice.org, for example, can almost be summarised as "adding the features Microsoft paid us to add to OpenOffice.org" (antifeatures like OOXML, which helped Microsoft ram is down ISO's throat). Novell tries monetising Sun's work to which they added OOXML and other such antifeatures. And who can ever forget Novell's Windows-only OpenOffice releases?

"Will Novell give its OpenOffice.org-related software patents to Microsoft now?"Based on Michael Applebaum's latest PR piece, Novell's marketers are back to their odd buzzterm, "agility", as well as "cloud computing" (more on Fog Computing in this other PR post) and of course "innovation", the bigger word for "invention" and sometimes a synonym or eurphemism for "patent" (which itself is a euphemism for monopoly). What ever happened to "open source" at Novell? It dissipated after the Microsoft deal.

Novell can go on and on about award nominations (for obscure awards like the CODiE we mentioned the other day), reviews and "success stories", but the company is a total failure which now feeds Microsoft and some other foes of GNU/Linux with Linux-hostile patents. A lot of pressure is being put on regulatory agencies to stop the CPTN deal, but the OSI and FSF forget to place a lot of the blame and the pressure where it fits (more on that important subject will come later). The main problem is Novell, which could theoretically still withdraw its CPTN deal. Instead, Novell is eager to just sell its patents to Microsoft as soon as possible and an acquisition by attachMSFT is scheduled for 6 days from now, based on Novell. Nobody even raises the question about Novell's motives. The issue was deflected by spin. Remember what we wrote in 2006 about Novell as a patent minefield in OpenOffice.org. Will Novell give its OpenOffice.org-related software patents to Microsoft now? Boycott Novell. ⬆

IBM Starts 2026 a Much Smaller Company (Not Homage to Gerstner): People who get bluewashed out of their job (or bluewashed into unemployment) are gagged by NDAs
Microsoft XBox Having a "Dog Ate My Homework" Moment: No New Console Until 3 Years From Now... Because "RAM Prices": Who will ever remember this in 2028? Nobody.
Gemini End of Year Capsules Tally (Based on Lupa) Shows About 10% Growth: What a difference a year makes
Dr. Andy Farnell Explains Why Chatbots Became Dishonesty on Top of Dishonesty (Hiding Usage of Dishonest Salads of Words): new article from CyberShow
The Slop Industry is Failing So Badly (Mountains of Debt, Losses) That It's Merging With the SPAM Industry: we reckon that Google will eventually delist all slopfarms, recognising they're just a form of SPAM
Links 31/12/2025: Cheeto Pushing for More Wars, ‘Security is a Shared Responsibility’: Links for the day
Enshittification of Postal Services Isn't Technological Advancement: Societies that say the aim is to "go digital" and eliminate paper trail aren't advanced; they're moving backwards
XBox is Likely Dead Already, But the Threat It Posed to Us All for Two Decades Isn't Over: "the Xbox was never about gaming and merely served as a test bed for DRM in commodity systems."
Ahead of 2026 Mass Layoffs at Microsoft the Tree Gets Shaken to See Who 'Falls' (Resigns/Retires): "We had a quiet meeting last week about budget realignment. No one said layoffs, but it’s clear where the focus is shifting."
Almost 6,5000 Pages in 2025, Aiming Higher in 2026: if we can keep focused, then quantity will increase
Gemini Links 31/12/2025: New Resolution, Reverse Hexdump, and Programming Languages: Links for the day
Links 31/12/2025: Nvidia Faces Bubble-Bursting Moment, Saudi Oil Money Pumped Into Chatbots to Keep the Energy Waste Going (Circular Financing Again): Links for the day
Richard Stallman's First Talk in a U.S. College Since 2018: Greetings from Georgia Tech!
EPO People Power - Part XX - Why António Campinos Chose to Put His Cokehead Friend on 'Sick Leave': EPO Cocainegate will be covered for months to come
Over at Tux Machines...: GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, December 30, 2025: IRC logs for Tuesday, December 30, 2025
Gemini Links 30/12/2025: FreeBSD, Gemlogs, and Xobaque: Links for the day
Get Ready for Gigantic XBox Layoffs at Microsoft (Much Bigger Than in 2025): he unionisation drive is a sign workers already expect this
Concern Trolls: Stop Criticising Poor Gerstner Because Now He's Dead. Reality Check: Gerstner Has Found a Trick for Dodging Tax on His Hundreds of Millions in Wealth.: Maybe even billions in wealth
Samoa: GNU/Linux and ChromeOS Rose to Around 11%: based on Web access data from Samoa
DnD: Debian and Drugs: There will soon be some interesting new information about Debian
A Conundrum of Privacy/Surveillance: Will You Give Them a Stool Sample to "Feel Humane"?: What if skinnerboxes in South Korea also required that people provide urine and stool samples?
Nope, There's No Twitter "Successor": There's a lot of horrible abuse going on in social control media
A Calm Year in IRC is a Good Year for IRC: Next year IRC will turn 38 (in August) and in 2028 it'll turn 40, just like the FSF did a couple of months ago
Slopfarms Covering Up for "Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella" After a Terrible Performance and a Terrible Year at Microsoft: How to cause many to resign/retire, hence not be counted as "layoffs"
IBM Was Never Saved, It Has Been a Downhill Journey for Decades Already: Gerstner wasn't a tech person but a fiscal butcher
Some GNU Joiners in Geminispace: Jose E. Marchesi (known for GNU poke and a bunch of other things) adopted Gemini Protocol
Jean-Slop Van Damme and the Art of Bull--- Code: it's saving neither time nor money
IBM Seems to be Doing to HashiCorp What It Did to Red Hat (Many Key People Leaving): "Today marks my last day at HashiCorp, wrapping up an incredibly rewarding 5-year journey"
State of the Slop, Day 364: How does Phoronix feel about Google promoting slopfarms that 'rewrite' its stories and slap slop images on top?
Links 30/12/2025: "Durian Tsunami" and "Unneeded Surgeries": Links for the day
Links 30/12/2025: Social Control Media Detox, Rage Against Slop Wasting People's Productive Capacities: Links for the day
Reality Check About IBM's Louis Grestner, Slopfarms Say He Was IBM CEO for 30 Years!: It is "hallucinating" (lying)
Debt as the New Currency?: Rich people get richer because they take money from the rest of us, if not directly then by compelling us (collectively) to borrow money at a national level, then "invest" in them
EPO People Power - Part XIX - "Berenguer Has Known of Campinos' Substance Abuse First Hand For a Long Time": "You rightfully claimed that Berenguer is Campinos' protegee"
Gemini Links 30/12/2025: Quitting Coffee, Apartment by the Beach, and Strange Retail Ethics: Links for the day
Nintendo and Sony Outsold Microsoft XBox by 15:1!: The mass layoffs indicate Microsoft is aware of this
Over at Tux Machines...: GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, December 29, 2025: IRC logs for Monday, December 29, 2025
Slopfarm: Firing 35,000 Employee is "Saving the Company": "Big Blue" is getting smaller all the time
Slopfarms About the "Linux CEO" Linus Torvaldos [sic]: nowadays NVIDIA builds and helps build a giant Ponzi scheme
Vista 11 is "10" (Ten Percent): Some months ago Microsoft openly admitted that it had lost (shed off) hundreds of millions of Windows users
Dealing With Online Pogroms: lawfare funded by third parties
The Year Apple Would Rather Forget: We await further stumbles and falls from Apple (in 2026)
"EU's reform agenda threatens to erase a decade of digital rights": This is really sad for those of us who spent decades promoting and boosting/advocating the EU
IBM Layoffs in India, More Coming Soon, Say Apparent Insiders: Threads regarding IBM layoffs
Gemini Links 29/12/2025: Earlier "Happy New Year 2026" and "Dead Archivist Society": Links for the day
Links 29/12/2025: Putin Critic Sergei Udaltsov Imprisoned, Cloudflare’s Outages Discussed: Links for the day
LLMs Are Inherently Parasitic, We Need to Treat Them Accordingly: a maintenance burden for those who possess actual intelligence
Links 29/12/2025: Bottled Water Considered Harmful, Cheetos Promoting Nazis in Europe: Links for the day
EPO People Power - Part XVIII - European Patent Office "Paints Itself as Progressive While Literally Being Represented by Cokeheads": To what length/s will German authorities and media (not just in Germany) go to protect the EPO's "precious image"?
What IBM Will Do to Red Hat in the Coming Year or Years: This won't end up well for GNU/Linux as a whole
Not Turning in His Grave: When People Die, Their Corporate Destruction Becomes a "Turnaround": All he did was mass layoffs - a tradition that has not ended since then
Over at Tux Machines...: GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, December 28, 2025: IRC logs for Sunday, December 28, 2025
Louis Gerstner Has Died, His Legacy of Mass Layoffs at IBM Hasn't: Hagiographies will follow. They will say he "saved" IBM.
Links 29/12/2025: The Sunday Routine, Limits of Memory, and Gemini Vocabulary: Links for the day

Having Added Mono and OOXML to OpenOffice.org, Novell Wants to Cash in and Give Patents to Microsoft

Recent Techrights' Posts