Posted in Asia, Novell, Rumour at 6:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Yesterday we mentioned a rumour which talked about 1,100 jobs to be axed at Novell. This aligns with Matt Asay’s inside knowledge about 20-25% of the workforce possibly being cut.
As reported and confirmed by the press, 250 jobs were recently moved to India. It is not the only story, however, because the EFYTimes has just revealed some equally discouraging stories from India itself.
The buzz is that, as part of this reorganisation, top shots at Novell India have moved out including Revathi Kasturi, managing dierctor, Novell India. And now Sandeep menon, the ex-IBMer who was heading Linux sales, will head the entire Indian sales team/operations.
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Sources indicate that the new team is now going to totally focus on Linux-related products and services, while all other products like GroupWise, etc. will be sold only when the customer demands. It is still to be seen what role Novell’s ‘colonial cousin’ Microsoft played in this earthquake.
Left with Novell:
Sandeep Menon, head, Novell’s sales operations in India
Nishant Verma, head, government and telecom
Rahul Krishna Gupta, linux business
Dr PK Mishra.
Left novell
Revathi Kasturi, managing director
Jayant Rastogi, director channels
Amit Nagar, director channels
Amit Bhatnagar, BSFI and manufacturing
Shashi Kapoor, director, government and telecom.
Why has Novell been so quiet in the past week? This comes shortly after a rumour that many more may lose their jobs.
Novell made a real moronic move with that ‘deal’ — a deal with its predatory rival. Not only has it hurt everyone else that sells Linux, but it hasn’t helped Novell, either.
It’s the employees that are now being punished as a whole, due to the poor management, which apparently received hidden personal benefits. We want the old Novell back — the Novell that used to sell and promote Linux (without the FUD) back in 2005.
“Because “quickie” has a sexual connotation, we shall from now on use the string “Quick Mention: “”Sometimes we find a particular piece of news which is only worth a mention, but is not worthy of a whole story or further commentary. In the past we prepended, on very few occasions, the string “Quickie: ” to flag such items (for filtering purpose, whether mental or actual filters). Because “quickie” has a sexual connotation, we shall from now on use the string “Quick Mention: “. This will be an indicator in items that contain little original content and are mainly pointers to breaking and/or important news.
The Guangzhou Daily in southern China, near Hong Kong, reports the company has not yet agreed to fulfill the conditions of its European agreement in China.
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China just recently passed an anti-trust law, the paper writes, which is not yet in effect, and Microsoft (China) Co. Ltd. did not tell the paper when or if it would release the code outside Europe.
This could play a big role in fair interoperability debates, where Novell has become a foe (sidling with Microsoft plan for Linux ‘patent fees’).
Because of their products’ large market shares in China, companies like Microsoft, Intel, and Kodak are among those with obvious reason to be watching these developments closely.
Specifically, Bill Gates, citing China as an example, said:
“Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don’t pay for the software,” he said. “Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
According to Korean newspaper Chosun, the US software mammoth has been accused of causing a loss in sales revenue estimated at W30bn (US$1=W918) because the firm’s Windows operating system comes pre-loaded with a media player and instant messaging.
Seoul Central District Court confirmed yesterday that Digito was suing Microsoft in the US and Korea, claiming that the software giant had violated the Fair Trade Act since 2000.
Lu argued that Microsoft had violated his legal rights by providing a formal contract which had to be accepted in order to proceed with the installation.
An reader whom we spoke to, who also prefers to remain unnamed, has shared the following bits of insight with us.
From Louis Villa:
…if you want to see what the most advanced patent trolls are thinking, this paper (co-written by a brilliant stanford IP prof and Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures, formerly Microsoft) is a really interesting read. It deserves much broader coverage and interest than it has received.
So, this is what they are thinking when it comes to “patent reform”; by no means do they want to abolish the patent regime over pure software and generic ideas, they just want the patent trolls out. On the other side, we, the Free Software Community should fight for a complete abolishment of software patents. We must discourage the EU authorities from legalizing software patents, so the US can take that as a model and not the reverse, where trans-national corporations are trying to export the corrupt patent regime to Europe and elsewhere with the aid of WIPO. If the problem becomes global it will be much harder to correct afterwards.
In this video you can watch Steve B. cynically asking for patent reform, but “not throwing the baby along with the bathwater”. This is what he refers to:
The only thing is that is an interesting part about patents in Ballmer’s video starts from minute 1:00 on (the first minute is a question by someone from Vodafone).
“The solution is straightforward: require publication of patent assignment and license terms. Doing so won’t magically make the market for patents work like a stock exchange; there will still be significant uncertainty about whether a patent is valid and what it covers. But it will permit the aggregate record of what companies pay for rights to signal what particular patents are worth and how strong they are, just as derivative financial instruments allow markets to evaluate and price other forms of risk. It will help rationalize patent transactions, turning them from secret, one-off negotiations into a real, working market for patents. And by making it clear to courts and the world at large what the normal price is for patent rights, it will make it that much harder for a few unscrupulous patent owners to hold up legitimate innovators, and for established companies to systematically infringe the rights of others”
As stated by Louis Villa:
‘reform’ by itself will not be sufficient to protect anyone, since trolls with a dozen strong patents will be just as threatening as trolls with hundreds of patents of unknown quality.
We MUST defend the latest software-patents-free area of the western world before the WIPO tries to take over the EU and tries to standardize the corrupt US patent regime in Europe as well (also as a stop in the middle of the way towards trying impose patents to China, as a requisite to allow that country into the WTO, but that is another story).
To fight the FUD and make people wake and be aware of the colossal TRAP for our future that Microsoft is trying to lay in front of us.
We thank the anonymous contributor for this analysis and welcome further commentary.
Novell has announced further enhancements to its security information and event management (SEIM) solution, Sentinel 6. The new service pack helps Sentinel 6 gather and correlate security and non-security information from across an organization’s networked infrastructure.
According to the company, the Novell Access Manager 3 service pack features the following enhancements: enterprise-mode SSL VPN, which provides secure access to more applications, including File and Print services from Microsoft and Novell; an improved administration interface, which facilitates navigation when managing multiple devices; authentication levels…
I had a great call with First American Title Holding Co. about Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 the other day.
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Kurt Johnston, a lead engineer on the First American migration, wasn’t optimistic. “I did not have high expectations for Xen,” Johnston told me in a call last week. “With Xen being as young as it is, I was expecting it to be very difficult to install and configure a new domU onto dom0.” Johnston and his boss, IT director Dan McDougall, were also wary of performance issues they had read about in trade magazines and had heard from other users throughout the year.
But they were soon pleasantly surprised, and so was I.
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I find all of this interesting because it will mean more choices. More choices means competition, and competition means happier customers. Happier customers are more apt to speak to the press and tell their stories. Whether the technology ultimately makes the customers happy, well, that’s what we’re here to find out.
The nation’s leading builder of luxury homes, Toll Brothers, has chosen a portfolio of Novell® solutions to protect confidential client data, standardize its desktops and reduce IT administration costs. A Fortune 500 company, Toll Brothers is using several Novell enterprise management solutions to strengthen security with centralized control of user access to client information and automated desktop management to minimize time spent updating and troubleshooting application software.
He is in the city on an invitation from the Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT) to install the Orca open source (Linux) and free software for use by the visually handicapped persons and to educate ELCOT officials. Incidentally, the State’s Rehabilitation Department had given Rs. 5 lakh to the ELCOT for purchase of a computer.
“I have been using proprietary software since 1988 and have moved to non-proprietary software since 2000, as it gave the much needed freedom. The proprietary software is costlier than the costliest laptops. The users are under the mercy of software firms, since they are not allowed to carry out customisation as per their needs. Hence, I started popularising Ubuntu, a community developed operating system on open source,” he said at the inaugural session on Monday.
Novell’s Systems & Resource Management (SRM) Business Unit focuses upon providing solutions to manage, simplify and control mixed-source environments. Joseph Wagner, General Manager, SRM, Novell talks to Abhinav Singh about the challenges of mixed-resource environments and how the SRM division is helping solve them.
Microsoft said on Wednesday it had formally withdrawn two remaining appeals before the European Union’s Court of First Instance against European Commission antitrust decisions.
The following new article indicates that Microsoft is unlikely to escape heavy fine though. In fact, billions in fines are foreseen, but given what Microsoft has just achieved in Europe, these fines are insignificant in the long term. Europe has mistakenly enabled Microsoft to continue its monopoly abuse and exclude Free software rivals.
More about the appeals:
It [Microsoft] also appealed against the Commission’s demands that it make the protocols available to open-source software developers.
However, in light of the agreement reached between Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes on Monday, these appeals became redundant.
What a disaster. In South Korea, a lawsuit has meanwhile been launched to protest against monopoly abuse.
According to Korean newspaper Chosun, the US software mammoth has been accused of causing a loss in sales revenue estimated at W30bn (US$1=W918) because the firm’s Windows operating system comes pre-loaded with a media player and instant messaging.
Seoul Central District Court confirmed yesterday that Digito was suing Microsoft in the US and Korea, claiming that the software giant had violated the Fair Trade Act since 2000.
This was pretty much foreseen. Hopefully, lawsuits in Asia will be more fruitful. They also prove that complaints about Microsoft are consistent and they are not a case of Europe being “anti-American” (some such accusations are made).
Spotted in an essay found through Bob Sutor’s blog:
I heard Microsoft claiming that OOXML is open because it is in XML. In “open” they mean that anyone can use, process, manipulate, interpret OOXML documents. Is that really so? I say not!
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The claim from Microsoft regarding OOXML being open because it is an XML format hits that very point I was making. This is just plain wrong and people need to understand why.
Some have said that Microsoft gives a bad name to XML, whose purpose was not to contain binary enclosures, patents, and redundancy.
On Tuesday, Amazon search subsidiary A9.com was awarded U.S. patent no. 7,287,042 for ‘including a search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting.’ In the Summary of the Invention, it’s explained that ‘a user wishing to search for ‘San Francisco Hotels’ may do by simply accessing the URL www.domain_name/San Francisco Hotels, where domain_name is a domain name associated with the web site system.’
No, it’s not a joke. It’s real. It’s unbelievable.
According to the following source (assemblage of several others), patent litigation by Acacia could actually face the peril which is patentability of software. Several months ago we saw cases where this type of patentability was tested and failed.
Before open source-specific issues can be decided, however, the court will have to decide a broader question: Is software even patentable?
This case can apparently go on for years, which brings to mind the bogus SCO litigation. It lasted for more than 4 years, essentially serving as long-lasting and free-of-substance FUD. Questions remains about Microsoft’s connection to Acacia, but evidence is still very compelling.
Is all this smoke [Acacia-Microsoft links] just coincidence? It may well be. But the smoke gets thicker by the day.
With the quality of its administrative service, education and patent security revamped to keep abreast of global standards, the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) is winning international recognition as a world-class intellectual property agency
Speaking of patents, Boycott Novell is actually being cited in Wikipedia (e.g. [1, 2], even on software patents.
Worth the wait? Regular retail price (RRP) is no more
Documentation for interoperability has become the central point of debate in Europe. We expected some of this to become available for free of charge, but after Neelie Kroes spoke to Steve Ballmer on the phone, it turns out that there’s somewhat of a settlement in Europe (no appeal). Here are the details.
It will also allow that data to go to open source companies such as Linux, and will cut the price it charges for worldwide licenses — including patents — to less than 7 percent of what Microsoft originally claimed.
Why is Microsoft allowed to charge money after deliberately deviating from standards? As the following new article shows, Microsoft intends to continue with an “‘independent’ path”.
Speaking to the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Ballmer would not comment directly on any potential acquisitions, but he said Microsoft’s current focus is the “independent path.”
“If at some point it makes sense, maybe then it makes sense. But that’s not where we are going. We are driving in an independent direction,” said Ballmer in a question-and-answer session.
How much will companies be charged to interoperate because standards will be ignored and conceded (backed by the power of takeovers)?
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