03.13.10
Posted in Finance, Google, Interview, Mail, Marketing, Novell, Ron Hovsepian, Videos, Virtualisation at 2:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Salt Lake Valley
Summary: Novell’s proprietary business assets and what they have been up to in the past week
NOVELL news coverage has recently been overwhelmed by the big bid [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Novell’s PR team has been very active despite all of this and it hardly even mentioned the bid, instead choosing to focus on fluff like SaaS and a survey that Novell was conducting itself in order to support its position, apparently.
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03.07.10
Posted in Mail, Novell, SCO, Security, Servers, Videos, Virtualisation at 4:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Highlights of Novell news, including the important announcement of Cloud Security Alliance
THE news about the takeover [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] is very major and we will cover it separately in the next post. Novell’s proprietary business did not receive much coverage because of this news about a takeover bid, but there are still some bits worth going through.
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02.27.10
Posted in Corel, Courtroom, Mail, NetWare, Novell, SCO, Security, Virtualisation, VMware, Xen at 8:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: As indicated in the title, this is a collection of many news items spanning many subjects
NOVELL’S biggest news this time around is its financial report, but we will cover that separately. Here are some news clippings about Novell’s proprietary (or otherwise non-SUSE) side of business.
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02.22.10
Posted in Mail, Microsoft, Novell, OpenSUSE, Red Hat, Virtualisation, VMware, Windows, Xen at 9:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another loss for Novell and odd new moves in mail and virtualisation
NOVELL is increasingly being dumped for Google and several days ago we found another new example:
Students and faculty alike who have been growing frustrated with Novell Tigermail should soon be able to breathe a sigh of relief.
The university’s current e-mail client will be replaced with Google Apps for Education. The shift will not require anyone to change their e-mail addresses.
They should host their own mail. Sharing people’s private correspondence with some dissociated company is neither wise nor fair. But that’s another story.
One of the OpenSUSE folks writes about Bongo, which is a mail project that’s derived from what Novell buried [1, 2] after it had signed the deal with Microsoft (see this story about Zimbra, which is now owned by former Microsoft executives at VMware).
I’ll take Bongo as my first example. For those that have no idea what Bongo is let me explain: Bongo is an evolution of some forward thinking by some people who used to work at Novell. It started out as the Hula Project; then Novell sold the related assets off due to strategy alignments (or whatever); a few of us wanted to continue and forked the code and created the Bongo Project. OK so that’s a brief history but what is it? Bongo is a lightweight and simple e-mail & calendaring solution, it is based on proven technology – the heritage goes back to NIMS if I’m not mistaken. Whoopee do there are like a million and one e-mail solutions out there. Yes but not all in one solutions that are light on resources and contain all functions. Bongo is NOT a groupware product, it is aimed at SMBs, geeks education and pretty much anyone that just wants e-mail, calendaring and contacts. Think of it as a FOSS solution to provide the functionality of Gmail+Google Calendar. Here endeth the history lesson.
[...]
I know for a fact that there may be one or two items that I’ve listed that could be contentious, and do you know what? I sincerely hope so 
Now don’t get me wrong, I really do appreciate and am grateful for all the work effort and money that Novell has invested in openSUSE; but it isn’t fair at all for Novell to keep carrying the Project. If anyone thinks they’re not, you are living in lala land. Sure some of it might be their own doing, but a lot isn’t and it is up to us the community help them so that we can benefit even more.
OpenSUSE has been eerily quiet since Zonker left.
Going back to VMware and Zimbra, see the following posts about EMC and Microsoft:
To cut a long story short, EMC has VMware, which has Zimbra. Now there is this new press release which shows EMC supporting a direct rival of its very own Zimbra:
EMC Helps Define Information Governance for Microsoft Exchange 2010
EMC® Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced it is expanding its efforts to help customers accelerate their journey to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 implementations and build actionable information governance strategies. Exchange 2010-ready, EMC SourceOne™ solutions further extend the archiving, retention, and e-discovery features of Exchange 2010, allowing organizations to manage their e-mail and other data efficiently and cost effectively while ensuring that all information is protected and available.
That’s a little iffy. Doesn’t EMC support Zimbra? Let’s remember that EMC is Microsoft’s Partner of the Year for 2008 and so is Citrix, which has just partnered with Novell. From the press release:
Citrix Systems, Inc. and Novell, Inc. announced a collaboration that expands choice for customers through increased virtualization interoperability and new assessment tools to help pinpoint the economically most advantageous approach to virtualization. Through this new partnership, Novell has certified SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a Perfect Guest running on Citrix XenServer and both companies will provide joint technical support to customers. As a result of this agreement, the more than 4,500 enterprise applications certified as Novell Ready for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server are now Citrix Ready community-verified when running in a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server guest virtual machine on XenServer.
[...]
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the only Linux operating system that has been optimized to be the perfect guest on all major hypervisors, with outstanding performance when running on XenServer.
That last sentence is a strong and ambitious claim, but Microsoft’s support for SUSE can count for something extra (from Novell’s point of view). The above can also be found right here in Reuters and some other sources, but what’s even more interesting is Novell’s apparent attempt to catch up with Red Hat where Xen is involved. Novell already builds a Wiki about what seems like a KVM hypervisor.
Believe it or not, it looks as though Novell is now researching the creation of yet another virtualization platform. No, this one isn’t based on Xen. Instead, the software company appears to be jumping on the KVM bandwagon and is looking to build a new open source project based on KVM.
Well, KVM is Red Hat’s, which makes it just slightly awkward. █
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02.19.10
Posted in GNU/Linux, Mail, Microsoft, Windows at 2:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft is looking into serious problems with Hotmail and adding some GNU/Linux-hostile elements to phones
HOTMAIL is up to no good again. A new Hotmail issue that we mentioned the other day is still being “investigated” by Microsoft rather than denied. It involved a breach into people’s account details.
Microsoft investigates Hotmail privacy breach
[...]
In its statement, the software giant said, “Microsoft takes customers’ privacy seriously, and immediately upon learning of these reports, we started an investigation. We will take appropriate action once we have completed the investigation.”
For other important reasons, Hotmail is worth a special mention. It is not only responsible for a lot of the world's SPAM but it was also blocking GNU/Linux users after Microsoft had overhauled it. It was not an isolated incident and other services from Microsoft took the same route [1, 2, 3].
“So once again, Microsoft is ‘competing’ through exclusion and ‘punishment’ of competitors.”Microsoft takes this attitude even further with its rather disastrous mobile phones push. Well, it is not exactly shocking as we saw this coming and then cited hints of it (at least twice before this year, namely from CRN and from a longtime Microsoft booster). Yesterday at The Register, Microsoft booster Gavin Clarke confirmed that Microsoft would spread its anti-web standards weapon (Silver Lie) to boost its already-disappointing Windows Phone 7. So once again, Microsoft is ‘competing’ through exclusion and ‘punishment’ of competitors. Inoculation with proprietary software is never the solution, unless you are Microsoft. █
“The entire ambition for the Windows team was to create something “cool” that was also visually stimulating to the eye. Their goal was to create a virtual software layer that would unite the hardware and software marketplace on a single standard—a standard, once again, controlled by Microsoft.”
–Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, a book composed
by the daughter of Microsoft’s PR mogul
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02.18.10
Posted in DRM, GNU/Linux, Hardware, Kernel, Mail, Microsoft, Standard at 8:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More cornerstones of Microsoft’s lock-in break apart and Outlook too is suffering from serious issues
DEPARTURES from Microsoft carry on as the company is failing [1, 2, 3, 4]. The latest Microsoft manager to jump ship will add to Amazon poison (many former Microsoft executives are moving there, e.g. [1, 2]), but the most interesting detail was his professional focus at Microsoft:
Microsoft has lost another key employee to Amazon.com. George Stathakopoulos, a computer security expert who’d been with Microsoft for nearly two decades, took a job at Amazon, Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos confirmed. Stathakopoulos was general manager of the Trustworthy Computing Group at Microsoft and was front and center in Microsoft’s efforts to combat the Conficker worm last year.
“Trustworthy Computing Group,” eh? What an Orwellian title/name for the group.
For those who have not heard yet, Microsoft’s Xbox DRM is going down the loo. Here is one report about the subject (published yesterday):
Hardware hacker Christopher Tarnovsky just wanted to break Microsoft’s grip on peripherals for its Xbox 360 game console. In the process, he cracked one of the most heavily fortified chips ever put into a consumer device.
[...]
Its genesis came when Tarnovsky learned that manufacturers of video game controllers had to obtain a license from Microsoft for the peripherals to work on the Xbox 360. The requirement offended his sense of fair play, so he put his reverse engineering muscle to breaking it.
“I was very surprised they would put a security chip in a wired controller, as well as a wireless controller,” he said. “It’s very monopolistic what they’ve done. They have a right to do it, but I have a right to break it too.”
[...]
Using the tungsten as microscopic bridges, Tarnovsky said, he can digitally clone chips used to prevent piracy of satellite TV service, to disable unauthorized cartridges in printers – or to make Xbox game controllers.
“You could counterfeit this chip,” he said, although he stressed he had no plans to use the hack for illegal purposes.
One of our readers “thought that the boot sequence in WinTEL hardware was restricted such that unauthorised software couldn’t get on to it,” according to mail he sent us last night regarding TPM getting cracked. He adds: “Remember how dual-boot couldn’t work anymore if Bitlocker was active? It’s called Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and utilised a ‘trusted boot pathway’. Why isn’t the big story that TPM is broken?”
Well, actually, is it being reported and circulated more widely while we write this. Attempts to put TPM in Linux will hopefully fail too; it’s a case of security as lock-in, to use the words of Bill Gates. Our Linux DRM warnings go a while back as it's a curse, not a feature or a blessing. There is a similarity here.
For those who think that Microsoft DRM/TPM is the only thing breaking today, here is another one to have a field day with:
Outlook bug creates monster e-mail files
Microsoft is trying to fix a bug in the e-mail program Outlook 2010 Beta that creates unusually large e-mail files that take up too much space.
They just cannot implement things properly, can they? They also ignore mail storage standards, which helps not at all. █
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02.16.10
Posted in Apple, Interoperability, Mail, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice, Protocol at 6:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A new story of migration to Microsoft (due to Apple’s reliance on Microsoft) offers an important lesson about the purpose of Novell’s Mono and Moonlight
AS we have shown before, Microsoft’s supine friends at Apple have helped OOXML and continues doing this. Based on the news about “Office for Mac 2011″ [1, 2], Mac OS X will accommodate more promotion of monoculture the Microsoft way. Matt Asay, for example, is a Mac user who extols the virtues of Microsoft Office and openly mocks OpenOffice.org. That’s apparently what Apple enthusiasts are for. Ironically enough, Canonical has made him a COO (a decision that we criticised in [1, 2, 3, 4]). COO rhymes with coup.
As one of our readers has said repeatedly, Microsoft inserts its APIs and non-standards into the competitors’ products and once that’s ‘injected’ they can proceed to infiltrating the server/desktop side interchangeably. As a specific example, this reader gave Office for Mac OS X (or Entourage). Based on the following new example from Internode, he was right. Internode is moving from FOSS to Microsoft Exchange and here is its explanation:
So what changed?
Snow Leopard was the key.
[...]
Apple delivered a huge corporate software upgrade in Snow Leopard, by tightly integrating Exchange client functionality into the operating system – in Apple Mail, iCal, and Contacts.
Now watch this discussion at Linux Today. “The lockin begins at internode,” says Petem. Rainer Weikusat reconstructs the arguments and starts with: “I have rarely seen such an amazing amount of BS in a single text.” Someone from Citadel writes: “Just wait until the first time Exchange blows itself up. That always happens eventually.” And one person says: “To pick this apart. All of your staff needs to have access to configure your filtering? Wow!!! Just plain WOW!!!”
“I have rarely seen such an amazing amount of BS in a single text.”
–Rainer WeikusatSo anyway, what Microsoft did here is simple. It used proprietary integration with something it controls not to facilitate interoperability but to upsell Microsoft products/stacks. It is the same with Mono and Moonlight. In more or less the same ways, Mono and Moonlight are ramps to Visual Studio, Windows, and other proprietary Microsoft products.
Why are Novell and Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza promoting these? We venture to guess that for selfish gain, some people promote this inside GNU/Linux. If their new interests are rewarded by Microsoft, then they would do anything. Stephane Rodriguez told us a couple of years ago: “So far, Microsoft has got all the marketing PR they wanted from “open-source” groups that are remarkably compatible with Microsoft minds. Again, I think those guys are just Microsoft persons who take a pride not to be on their payroll. (DeIcaza told me in the past that he’s rich). [...] DeIcaza took the role of [Microsoft's] Brian Jones, the technical person. (technical person who concentrates on never answering the good questions)…”
Here is Moonlight being used in what seems like a sort of Microsoft advert. Meanwhile we learn from a reader of ours that “Someone made Ada for .NET? (A#)”. Embrace and extend much? █
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02.14.10
Posted in Google, Mail, Microsoft, Novell at 5:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Novell GroupWise is being abandoned and removed from over 70,000 seats
NOVELL got dumped by the city of Los Angeles late last year [1, 2, 3, 4]. It was decided that Novell GroupWise did not deliver and the decision is further defended in this new article.
When the city picked Google’s productivity tools along with its popular e-mail service Gmail, what initially was thought to be a run-of-the-mill IT project quickly morphed into something bigger and more complex. The decision stoked a period of intense lobbying from L.A.’s existing e-mail provider (Novell) and Google’s biggest competitor (Microsoft), rivals who likely saw the city’s decision to adopt Google’s hosted services as something that could potentially crack the state and local government market’s inertia when it comes to cloud computing.
This massive departure from Novell GroupWise could catalyse more of its kind and indeed, based on the following two reports from Australia, this is already happening. ITWire says:
Macquarie is currently in the process of dumping its in-house Novell GroupWise email infrastructure and moving 6,000 staff to Google’s Gmail platform; a move that comes after the university already shifted some 68,000 students into Google’s cloud.
More here:
It’s a perfect storm: Google’s cloud email is reaching reliability and manageability levels that Microsoft, IBM and Novell can’t keep up with, say big Aussie organisations.
What’s funny is that Google is headed by the former CEO of Novell. He is hitting Novell where it hurts these days, but Novell is reciprocating (doing the same thing) by helping Microsoft, the company which is most viciously attacking Google and attacking GNU/Linux. Where does that position Novell as far as GNU/Linux is concerned? █
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