The openSUSE Project has announced the appointment of Jos Poortvliet as openSUSE Community Manager starting August 1.
Poortvliet brings several years of community building experience to his new role and will be responsible for continuing to drive and grow the openSUSE project as well as serve as community liaison within Novell.
Zonker, who is the previous Community Manager, left Novell several months ago, so it took OpenSUSE a lot time to make this appointment. It took about half a year and Andreas Jaeger announced this in the mailing lists as follows:
We’re proud to announce today that Jos Poortvliet will join the openSUSE project and Novell as openSUSE Community Manager starting on August 1. With Jos we’ve found a leader with excellent community building experience combined with a very welcoming nature, many fresh, promising ideas and a strong drive to grow the openSUSE Project. Jos holds a degree in Organisational Psychology from the University of Utrecht and has gained valuable experience in several professional roles ranging from Project Manager at KPN to Service Level Manager at Royal Bank of Scotland. Last but not least, Jos is a leading member of the KDE Marketing Team and has helped Akademy and the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit attract a vibrant and collaborative audience.
Jos commented, “The opportunity to become part of the international openSUSE community is very exciting. There are a great number of interesting developments going on in the free software world, and openSUSE plays a major role in many of them. I look forward to working with the community on these, helping it grow, finding new directions and ways of developing, and delivering its innovative technologies to users and developers around the world.”
We enthusiastically welcome Jos and look forward to his working with the openSUSE community to shape the future of the openSUSE project. After his start he will be deeply involved in the openSUSE conference, other community events and activities, and of course he will have the pleasure of promoting openSUSE wherever possible.
Andreas
Poortvliet will be managing a strong KDE-oriented (but pro-DE choice) GNU/Linux distribution. It is mostly a representative role as people like Andreas, Coolo, and their colleagues coordinate development.
I generally like Poortvliet. He has been politely asking me in Identi.ca to go easy on Novell and SUSE (since approximately 2 months ago). █
“[Microsoft's] Mr. Emerson and I discussed a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would ‘backstop,’ or guarantee in some way, BayStar’s investment…. Microsoft assured me that it would in some way guarantee BayStar’s investment in SCO.”
–Larry Goldfarb, BayStar, key investor in SCO
Summary: Timely remarks about exchange of money and a quick look at who is funding who (and why)
In the latest news from SCO’s slow boat to absolutely nowhere, Novell has filed its opposition to SCO’s motion to stay taxation of costs. SCO filed this exact motion [PDF] in 2008, after it lost the first trial, Novell points out, and Novell opposed that motion too, and the motion was denied [PDF] by this very same court, and here they are with the same type of motion and even using the same stupid case that didn’t work for them the last time.
Given that SCO received money from Microsoft (both directly and indirectly), this ought to teach us a lesson about “money laundering” in one sense of the term. As the mainstream press carries on attacking IBM (we wrote about this episode of the IBM case yesterday), not much is being said about the fact that Microsoft provides financial support for some of those companies (“satellite proxies,” to use IBM’s words) that attack IBM through EU regulators. One confirmed example is T3 [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].
We also found it worthy to point out that Black Duck, which helps spread fear of the GPL, is now being paid by SAP, which is Microsoft’s European ally that Microsoft almost bought some years ago. █
Summary: A look at some of Microsoft’s latest bribes which are not a legal offence and some of the criminal acts of Microsoft and Bill Gates’ Corbis
WHEN IT COMES to Microsoft, there ought to be a distinction between “bribery” in the legal sense and “bribery” in the more metaphorical sense. Microsoft does both. Many mainstream publications accused Microsoft of “bribery” or attempted bribery when it decided to simply buy some customers rather than earn any [1, 2, 3]. Having failed to achieve much with this strategy (billions are being lost in the process), Microsoft is rebranding the same efforts and marketing them differently, this time characterising them as “charitable”. Yes, it’s like charitable bribery. George Orwell would love it!
Well, there’s a catch. In order to enable the $3 donation, users must set Bing as their default search engine.
It’s self evident. Microsoft is becoming rather scummy. But it’s marketed as a “charitable” endeavour, so how dare we criticise it? There are other miserable new attempts to crush Google’s cash cow (because Google also competes against Windows and Office, which are Microsoft’s cash cows).
Why can’t Microsoft attempt to earn customers and developers without bribing them? It’s a rhetorical question actually. How can Microsoft justify laying off more employees this month [1, 2]? Must it give their wages to people whom it tries to lure in?
Now we move on to some more serious charges where “bribery” means bribery in the legal sense. That’s where prosecution and jail sentence happen to those who are not affluent enough to bail themselves out (or bribe officials). Last week we wrote about the Bill Gates-owned Corbis scandal [1, 2], which came to light [1, 2] at a time when corruption in Intel and Dell also came to light. Yesterday we wrote about it again [1, 2] (also the day before that), owing to the fact that Dell fraud teaches us something about its attitude towards GNU/Linux. As the SEC put it in its press release:
Christopher Conte, Associate Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, added, “Dell manipulated its accounting over an extended period to project financial results that the company wished it had achieved, but could not. Dell was only able to meet Wall Street targets consistently during this period by breaking the rules. The financial results that public companies communicate to the investing public must reflect reality.”
According to this new report, the SEC does one thing right by giving “$1 million reward for information in Pequot insider trading case”:
The money goes to Glen Kaiser and Karen Kaiser of Southbury, Conn. She’s the ex-wife of David Zilkha, a former Microsoft Corp. employee who had accepted a job at Pequot.
The soon-to-be-signed financial reform package creates a new whistleblower program with potentially huge cash rewards for individuals who provide information about securities law violations to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
As a reminder, $4 million went to the Microsoft employee who exposed financial fraud inside the company and produced/shared documents as evidence. With the SEC’s new rules in place, how long will it take for another person who works for Microsoft to report Microsoft fraud? Microsoft paid its former CFO millions of dollars to keep quiet. █
“One strategy that Microsoft has employed in the past is paying for the silence of people and companies. Charles Pancerzewski, formerly Microsoft’s chief auditor, became aware of Microsoft’s practice of carrying earnings from one accounting period into another, known as “managing earnings”. This practice smoothes reported revenue streams, increases share value, and misleads employees and shareholders. In addition to being unethical, it’s also illegal under U.S. Securities Law and violates Generally Accepted Accounting Practices (Fink).
Dragoon keeps talking about “exploitation of open source software” and of “Linux”. Yes, he uses the word “exploit” (or “exploiting” and “exploitation”) quite a lot in this talk when referring to use. He must be thinking of Novell’s own attitude towards “open source”” and “Linux”. Novell is exploiting these. Also notice how more than once he has a hard time saying “open source software” (he says “open software”).
We could go on making criticisms about other things, such as the fact that he talks fluff-speak like “going forward” and he is using shamed analysts (Goldman Sachs for example) while pretending that they are not like PR, by actually saying so. Experience suggests otherwise.
I found the latest release of this distribution to be a solid offering. Some of the previous issues regarding codecs have been corrected, the new KDE desktop is light and fast. I like that openSUSE gives users the option to use the Smolt system profiler and YaST is an excellent control centre. The distro’s work with virtualization is great and there is a large selection of software available on the CD. The only thing I’d like to change about this distro is in regards to the package manager. The existing YaST tool for handling software is effective, but I’d like to see a more novice-friendly program added. Ubuntu offers a good example of this where they have a beginner-friendly Software Center and a separate menu entry for Synaptic. The way Linux handles software packages is, in my opinion, one of the operating system’s greatest strengths and it’s important not to frighten people away from it. Over-all, I see openSUSE 11.3 as a great release, possibly the best we’ve seen of the lizard yet.
As we argued yesterday, OpenSUSE volunteers out to fork and/or rebrand; people who work on SUSE for money ought to apply for a job somewhere like Red Hat. Novell is not the place to be at the moment and many people avoid SUSE because of the Novell affiliation. █
Summary: IBM names Microsoft as a source of the complaints (or at least their financier) which target GNU/Linux-powered mainframes
GNU/Linux has several people who may sometimes seem like its friends when obviously they are not. For starters there’s Florian Müller and there are others like Bill Beebe, who sometimes act as apologists for SCO and even this week show some disregard for GNU/Linux (Beebe does not use GNU/Linux and neither does Müller by all indications).
As we pointed out yesterday, Müller is again taking shots at IBM (mass-mailing journalists and posting in several places). He is still doing this today, even minutes ago. He is like a true lobbyist and he helps Microsoft’s agenda, whether he acknowledges it or not. Earlier this month it was Kevin McBride who also helped Microsoft’s agenda by boosting SCO's case. SCO is like Microsoft's patent troll, but this one uses copyright allegations and sues IBM using Microsoft funds. Groklaw responds to ZDNet’s poor reporting by emphasising: “Kevin isn’t SCO now. His brother isn’t either.”
“What strikes me is that the price in June was going up until June 10, when Stewart ruled for Novell (look at the activity for *that* day), and then it dropped back to 0.04 the next day, and that was the highest until July 9, when Kevin McBride posted claims about Linux.” –Pamela Jones, GroklawDarl was of course sacked. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (SJVN) made a mistake similar to that of ZDNet and Groklaw corrects him by stressing that “this isn’t SCO talking, in that the brothers McBride are no longer associated with SCO, unless SCO’s current leadership wishes to take credit for this event.”
Separately, Groklaw points out that SCO’s stock rose as a result of this McBride action. “I find this mezmerizing,” says Pamela Jones, “this chart of SCO’s daily share price. What strikes me is that the price in June was going up until June 10, when Stewart ruled for Novell (look at the activity for *that* day), and then it dropped back to 0.04 the next day, and that was the highest until July 9, when Kevin McBride posted claims about Linux. Then you see the price go up to a high today of 0.10. Coincidence?”
Later on Groklaw wrote about the TurboHercules case, noting: “First SCO and now TurboHercules. See a pattern, anyone? I certainly do. Microsoft and its “satellite proxies”. Someone needs to investigate that as an antitrust violation, in my view, using litigation and regulatory process to harm a competitor.”
IBM countered in its own statement that the EC’s accusations “are being driven by some of IBM’s largest competitors — led by Microsoft — who want to further cement the dominance of Wintel servers by attempting to mimic aspects of IBM mainframes without making the substantial investments IBM has made.”
In a statement, IBM said it “intends to cooperate fully” with the inquires. But it also asserts that the investigations were actually triggered by Microsoft (MSFT). “Let there be no confusion whatsoever: there is no merit to the claims being made by Microsoft and its satellite proxies,” IBM said. “IBM is fully entitled to enforce its intellectual property rights and protect the investments we have made in our technologies. Competition and intellectual property laws are complementary and designed to promote competition and innovation, and IBM fully supports these policies. But IBM will not allow the fruits of its innovation and investment to be pirated by its competition through baseless allegations.”
IBM, based in Armonk, New York, said in a statement that “there is no merit to the claims being made by Microsoft and its satellite proxies.”
“Certain IBM competitors which have been unable to win in the marketplace through investments in fundamental innovations now want regulators to create for them a market position that they have not earned,” IBM said.
Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, said in an e-mail that the company invests in startup companies such as T3 to give customers greater choice. The company isn’t a party to T3’s complaint against IBM, he said.
“We do share T3’s belief that there needs to be greater openness and choice for customers in the mainframe market,” Shaw said. “Customers tell us that they want greater interoperability between the mainframe and other platforms.”
Notice the wording. He does not deny Microsoft’s role. “Microsoft wasn’t a party to SCO v. IBM, either, but it gave money that made it possible for it to happen,” Jones explained. “You don’t have to be a party to be involved.” █
“…Microsoft wished to promote SCO and its pending lawsuit against IBM and the Linux operating system. But Microsoft did not want to be seen as attacking IBM or Linux.”
–Larry Goldfarb, BayStar, key investor in SCO approached by Microsoft
“[The EPO] can’t distinguish between hardware and software so the patents get issued anyway.”
–Marshall Phelps, Microsoft
Summary: The vague distinction between embedded and non-embedded software leaves room for Microsoft to harm Free software in New Zealand; Microsoft’s software patents still pushed into GNU/Linux via Novell
THE PATENT policy situation in New Zealand is an iffy one; it’s neither a win nor a loss, but a loophole remained to allow software companies (Microsoft et al.) to do there what they already do in Europe, namely patent their software. This issue with the loophole is being recognised by Red Hat’s Web site, which now states:
For the past few months, the debate revolved around the section titled “Patentable Inventions” in the Patents Bill. Right off the bat, this section says, “We recommend amending clause 15 to include computer programs among inventions that may not be patented.” This obviously did not go too well with the pro-software patents lobby and open source supporters feared that this recommendation may be overturned. However, on 15th July, 2010, a New Zealand Government web site reported that Commerce Minister, Simon Power instructed the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (IPONZ) to develop guidelines to allow inventions that contain embedded software to be patented. “My decision follows a meeting with the chair of the Commerce Committee where it was agreed that a further amendment to the bill is neither necessary nor desirable,” Mr. Power said.
[...]
“We recommend that the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand develop guidelines for inventions containing embedded software.”
This is not too helpful, particularly the latter part. It leaves room for Microsoft to sneak its patents in and bully users/vendors/distributors of Linux, just as it did in Europe with TomTom.
Summary: Terrible mistake from Apple could cost not just Apple customers in terms of security but also cost others who share the same ‘pipes’
ANY update served for security purposes is one which is crucial in preventing chaos and enhancing confidence. It’s not about adding features. Older versions of software tend not to be maintained, thus for security reasons it’s important to make updates and upgrades free. That’s the case with almost every GNU/Linux distribution, which is why most people use the latest version of the Free software that’s available. This contributes a great deal to security. According to some sources, Apple wants to charge for IOS updates:
TOYMAKER FOR THE WELL HEELED Apple, reeling from having to give away rubber bands to make its Iphone 4 work, is about to charge Ipad users to upgrade to the latest version of the Ithings OS.
Microsoft is having many security issues at the moment [1, 2, 3, 4] (we are completely out of sync with Microsoft news) and Apple may be following similar footsteps if it discourages people from using the latest software free of charge. There ought to be laws to encourage or enforce this for the benefit of one’s surroundings (Techrights is still under fire from Windows bots today and there are occasional downtimes as a results). Siemens too is having security problems with Windows at the moment [1, 2, 3] and removing the Windows worms “could disrupt power plants”.
Siemens has made a program available for detecting and disinfecting malware attacking its software used to control power grids, gas refineries, and factories but warned customers who use it could disrupt sensitive plant operations.
Wonderful. So Windows not only contributed to the Deepwater Horizon disaster [1, 2] but also to problems at power plants. Will they ever learn that proprietary software is not reliable or dependable? █
Summary: Novell is going down whereas Red Hat is a growth company, which means that a wise career choice for S.u.S.E. staff is defection to Red Hat
Novell is a dying company looking for a buyer. It’s also a weird company in the sense that, despite being a proprietary software company, it employs S.u.S.E. people who are truly passionate about GNU/Linux and sometimes Free software too. SUSE developers mustn’t be confused with Novell’s Ximian inheritance, which helps boost Microsoft these days (Mono and Moonlight are notable examples).
“Recently we’ve shared some stories where Red Hat employed SUSE talent that left.”In recent weeks we have been writing many posts urging OpenSUSE people (that’s what the project is about — people) to fork and rebrand. Another possibility is to go work for Red Hat. The SUSE developers are worth trusting; entryism that’s dangerous involves management types, Ximian folks, and proprietary software proponents, who are mostly separate from Novell’s inheritance from S.u.S.E.
Recently we’ve shared some stories where Red Hat employed SUSE talent that left. Now is a good time for SUSE developers to apply for a job at Red Hat, whose market cap today is three times that of Novell. To quote some news:
Shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) traded near a new 52-week high Friday of $33.21. Approximately 5.1 million shares traded hands Friday vs. average 30-day volume of 3 million shares.
Red Hat closed at $33.21, approximately 2.7% above its previous closing price. SmarTrend will be monitoring shares of RHT to see if it can push through this barrier.
“Rather than do volunteer work for Microsoft’s ally, those developers ought to look for a job somewhere like Red Hat, which is a growth company that does not pay Microsoft for GNU/Linux.”Now is a good time for those who work on OpenBallnux (Samsung too spreads Ballnux) to work on GNU/Linux again. OpenSUSE 11.3 Edu Li-f-e and OpenSuSE 11.3 were recently released and the reviews — although they are few — are generally positive [1, 2, 3, 4] because the developers have a lot of experience. Rather than do volunteer work for Microsoft’s ally, those developers ought to look for a job somewhere like Red Hat, which is a growth company that does not pay Microsoft for GNU/Linux. █
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