Leaving Novell in droves

Summary: Ken Muir moves from Novell to GWAVA where he will serve as CEO And CTO

THE OTHER day we asked readers whether we should leave Boycott Novell aside while dealing with more important and pressing issues (mostly software patents). Well, although Linux Today chose this article for its front page, we have not received sufficient feedback on it, except from Steve Stites who wrote:

We are nearly finished

Roy Schestowitz has put the most time and effort of anybody into the effort to break the Microsoft-Novell agreement so he is the most likely voice to declare the boycott Novell movement finished. My thoughts on the status of the boycott are:

When Attachmate killed the Mono project that removed one of our two principle problems with Novell. Mono is a dead issue.

Our other principle problem with Novell is the Microsoft-Novell agreement, especially as it dealt with software patents. Attachmate has issued a general statement that they would honor all of the Novell commitments so that agreement is still in force and still applies to software distributed by SuSE. I think that we should continue the boycott until SuSE issues an acceptable statement that they are no longer bound by the terms of the Microsoft-Novell agreement, especially the terms relating to software patents.

All of the bad things that have happened to Novell, Ron Hovsepian, and the others are merely collateral damage to the boycott (and in all honesty the boycott was only one of several factors that brought Novell down). We would have been quite satisfied with killing Mono and destroying the Microsoft-Novell agreement without any personnel changes at Novell or monetary punishment for Novell.

I think that we should continue the boycott, marking time so to speak, until SuSE issues an acceptable statement that they are no longer bound by the terms of the Microsoft-Novell agreement, especially the terms relating to software patents. But yes, we have won and we are only marking time until SuSE figures out a way to get rid of the Microsoft-Novell agreement.

While Novell is still around and amid transformation (there is still emission of new adverts in YouTube) we will keep track of its staff, for example Ken Muir who has just become CEO And CTO of GWAVA. Any future for Groupwise at all? Not based on Attachmate's actions thus far. The press release says that "Muir, 41, a former Novell executive, most recently served as CTO and Vice President of Novell's Collaboration business where he was instrumental in building Novell's collaboration strategy and products. Prior positions include Chief of Staff to the CEO and various engineering and product management leadership positions. Muir has over 15 years experience in the software industry ranging from engineering and development to product strategy and technology management. He brings to GWAVA strong executive leadership and extensive knowledge of enterprise messaging systems, security and compliance."

It sure seems like The Register got its news 2 months late regarding layoffs at Novell. For those who wonder about SUSE, the OpenSUSE Conference is being handled almost single-handedly by Jos Poortvliet, based on whoever almost always blogs. The other bits of news arrive from the very few volunteers who are left. Quoting Poortvliet:

Over the last month the conference team has received a large number of proposed sessions for the openSUSE conference. However, we also realize we have not entirely capitalized on the potential for especially the ‘interactive’ sessions we wanted. So we extend the deadline with two weeks to allow more BoF, Workshop and Hack sessions to be submitted. And we’ll release some more articles to explain what we want!

OpenSUSE sought funding for this event from some unexpected sources. Will it work out? ⬆