12.22.06
Posted in Action, Deals, Google, Humour, Novell, Red Hat at 12:33 am by Shane Coyle
Do you think that there was a chair tossed across a room while Ron Hovsepian was hollering that he will "f@%king kill Google" at Novell headquarters today?
By now, many are aware that Jeremy Allison is resigning from Novell in protest over the Microsoft deal, and speculation as to where he may end up included Novell competitor Red Hat, among others.
Well, it appears that Allison is instead heading to Google, where Samba will be "pushed forward, harder.", and he will have no further comments on the Novell situation until after the official end of his employment on the 29th.
Good luck and congratulations to both Google and Jeremy Allison. Anyone in the Waltham, Massachusetts area would do well to watch for flying furniture.
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12.21.06
Posted in Deception, GPL, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat at 11:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Let us suppose that Red Hat was right all along. RHEL is Unfakeable, not Unbreakable. Despite the predatory betrayal and the decreased support costs, Oracle can only attract 300 downloads per day.
In the first 30 days, we had 9,000 downloads of Unbreakable Linux from our website and hundreds of customers connecting their servers to our network.
This brings us to Novell’s GPL ripoff/sellout. Novell may suffer from the same PR backlash. It can never use organic surveys to attract informed customers, let alone a few optimistic minds, whose mind is disconnected from that of the beyrayed developers and peers.
Related articles:
Unbreakable Linux still unproven, analyst warns
IT managers running Red Hat Linux should think carefully before making the switch to Unbreakable Linux, the new Linux distribution that Oracle Corp. announced last month.
Our View: Don’t Fear Oracle’s Linux
Opinion: Oracle’s move will actually help Red Hat by boosting Linux’s already-growing presence in the enterprise.
Red Hat Dismisses Threat Posed by Oracle and Microsoft
Red Hat Inc’s executive vice president of worldwide sales, Alex Pinchev, has dismissed the impact that Oracle Corp’s entry into the Linux support business could have on Red Hat, insisting Oracle does not really know what it is doing.
Oracle up to bat: Red Hat bashing possible
The wild-card in all this is Oracle’s take on its Linux support initiative and what that means for Red Hat. Now it is possible Oracle won’t mention Linux, but typically Larry Ellison slaps some rival around and talking trash against SAP has got to be getting old.
Addendum: for the sake of comparison, Novell sees roughly 5,600 downloads a day; RHEL (not Fedora) is donwloaded about 12,500 per day. The moral of the story is that those who play fair certainly appeal to the customer. In fact, based on the latest from MarketWatch, “Red Hat is expected to report earnings per share of 12 cents for the third quarter, according to analysts polled by Thomson First Call.“
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Posted in Action, Boycott Novell, Deals, GPL, Microsoft, Novell, OpenSUSE at 10:38 am by Shane Coyle
More human resources announcements from Waltham. Groklaw is reporting that Jeremy Allison is leaving Novell, and there is no need to speculate: it is in protest of the Microvell deal.
The legendary Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame) has resigned from Novell in protest over the Microsoft-Novell patent agreement, which he calls “a mistake” which will be “damaging to Novell’s success in the future.”
His main issue with the deal, though, is “that even if it does not violate the letter of the licence, it violates the intent of the GPL licence the Samba code is released under, which is to treat all recipients of the code equally.” He leaves the company at the end of this month. He explained why in a message sent to several Novell email lists, and the message included his letter to management:
“Whilst the Microsoft patent agreement is in place there is *nothing* we can do to fix community relations. And I really mean nothing,” Allison wrote. “Until the patent provision is revoked, we are pariahs….Unfortunately the time I am willing to wait for this agreement to be changed …has passed, and so I must say goodbye.”
Head over to Groklaw for the full letter/statement, which includes a message that Allison had recently sent to Novell management:
For people who will point out to me we don’t "technically" violate the GPLv2 here’s an argument I recently made on the mailing lists.
"Do you think that if we’d have found what we legally considered a clever way around the Microsoft EULA so we didn’t have to pay for Microsoft licenses and had decided to ship, oh let’s say, "Exchange Server" under this "legal hack" that Microsoft would be silent about it – or we should act aggr[i]eved when they change the EULA to stop us doing this?"
It is always heartening to see folks take a stand for their beliefs, I wish Jeremy continued luck and success and applaud his taking a stand against this selfish deal.
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Posted in Deals, Deception, FUD, Intellectual Monopoly, Interoperability, Marketing, Microsoft, Novell, Patent Covenant, Patents at 1:30 am by Shane Coyle
As the saying goes, there are two sides to every story.
Novell has said, over and over, that their deal with Microsoft is an interoperability deal, with the IP considerations and Patent Covenant being a minor aspect of the deal.
Of course, we know that Microsoft sees the deal much differently, and the companies have agreed to disagree to date over the significance of the deal.
In an interview with Computer News Middle East, Microsoft’s Bill Hilf provided more on Microsoft’s perspective on the deal:
CNME There have been looming questions for years if Microsoft would file lawsuits over intellectual property contained in Linux. What is Microsoft’s motivation with Novell?
Hilf: This is an intellectual-property deal. There will be an overlap at some point between our intellectual property and open source that we have to resolve. We knew that. It was going to happen. It was just a question of when.
We said let’s put in place something that allows us to a) establish a process for how we can work with an open-source company on our intellectual property, b) do it in such as way that it can still work within the [GNU] GPL [general public license] and c) how do we do this in a way where we can clearly draw the line between the community developer, the non-commercial open-source community guy writing code and the commercial developer who is using open-source code.
CNME: What is the overlap between what Microsoft does and what the open-source community does?
Hilf: We have the largest software patent portfolio in the world. With open source we needed to have something in place where we knew that if our intellectual property was infringed upon we had a framework in place to resolve that in an effective way. The terms of the agreement that relate specifically to what we call covenants for Novell customers are related to the fact that those customers will be deploying a variety of open source.
We said there is a way we can cover that customer and still have value for our intellectual property. The second part is there is a large class of people in the community who are writing software for free and are not selling it and who may either intentionally or inadvertently step into that footprint of our intellectual property. What we are trying to do is draw the line between people who make money from this and people who don’t.
It is a relatively short, but pointed, interview relating almost entirely to Microsoft’s open source and intellectual property philosophies, and how the Novell deal relates. Interestingly, the word interoperability never arises, but then again like Mr. Hilf said, it’s an intellectual-property deal.
One thing that Microsoft and Novell apparently do agree upon is the exclusion of ‘commercial’ developers from their patent covenant, here is Novell South Africa country manager Stafford Masie at the recent CITI Forum Q&A:
Let me address ‘the only SUSE and why?’, I think its because we… because of the SUSE acquisition, the OpenSUSE distribution is within our fold, so we represent that distribution and this agreement with Microsoft, again, wasn’t just an openSUSE agreement, that’s part of the covenant exception for Linux but that covenant extends… it overarches all of our patent portfolio, so its the proprietary patent portfolios and its the open source innovations, etc so its both areas covered – so lets not make it agreement only for opensuse, it was an interoperability agreement with Microsoft this covenant is in place from a patent protection perspective for our entire range of technologies as far as that interoperability is concerned in Linux, so…
Secondly is, this is not exclusive, this is not an exclusive arrangement with Microsoft and we are encouraging Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc to consider a similar agreement, if it makes sense to them, with Microsoft. We, we are encouraging that, especially from a, y’know, patent perspective…
Not for commercial gain? Yes. Those that are hacking, the participants, we are protecting. People that are making a career out of it, people… this covenant does not protect those people, but everything else that we do protects you. We’ve got the OIN, we’ve got indemnification, there are so many other vehicles that have not been nullified by this agreement that you can gain access to.
So, again, make sure that you don’t look at it as an only OpenSUSE thing, it is a broader Microsoft-Novell interoperability that addresses SUSE, because SUSE is ours, and those that are doing it for commercial purposes, they’re covered by, I believe, the other vehicles we have in place, OK?
So, will Novell claim that Hilf’s comments have been taken out of context as well, or will they admit that Microsoft has had a different agenda from the very beginning?
Of course, perhaps Novell truly believes they can handle their agenda, whatever it may be.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Interoperability, Microsoft, Novell, Servers, SLES/SLED, Virtualisation at 12:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Some time ago, Microsoft and Novell announced joint courses for GNU/Linux and Windows. Microsoft Watch has taken its time to comment on this arrangement.
Another funny item is the slide titled “A Joint Solution,” which depicts a symbolic heterogeneous environment with a Windows logo hovering above six clip-art servers next to a SUSE logo sitting above three clip-art servers. That’s probably the sort of ratio that Microsoft is hoping to see moving forward.
This interesting little observation reveals subtle clues.
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12.20.06
Posted in Courtroom, Deals, FUD, GNU/Linux, Intellectual Monopoly, Interoperability, Marketing, Microsoft, Novell, Patent Covenant, Patents, Servers, Ubuntu, Virtualisation at 1:21 pm by Shane Coyle
Microsoft and Novell have announced that 3 large firms have opted to accept Microsoft’s stay out of court free coupons: Deutsche Bank AG, Credit Suisse and AIG Technologies.
REDMOND, Wash. and WALTHAM, Mass., Dec. 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Deutsche Bank AG, Credit Suisse and AIG Technologies today became some of the first customers to tap the benefits of the recently announced collaboration between Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT – News) and Novell Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL – News) on interoperability between Microsoft® Windows® and Linux.* Under three separate customer agreements, Microsoft will deliver to each company SUSE® Linux Enterprise subscription certificates, allowing these customers to take advantage of the Microsoft and Novell agreement. Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and AIG Technologies, which is a member company of American International Group Inc., highlighted the benefits of interoperability, the patent cooperation agreement and the road map for bidirectional virtualization solutions as the deciding factors in their choice.
Later in the announcement is the tidbit about “To date, more than 16,000 new certificates for SUSE Linux Enterprise have been activated under the Microsoft and Novell collaboration agreement.”, just after plugging the co-sponsored survey. It is not specified what percentage of the activated coupons are from these 3 customers.
I should note that during the Q&A session at the CITI forum, Stafford Masie also alluded to Microsoft actively distributing the certificates, so any theories that the coupons were to be "shelfware" seem to be disproven.
We’ve gotten Microsoft to buy $240M worth of Linux, ok, that’s 350K subscriptions of Linux, that’s awesome okay. So, they’re going to distribute that worldwide, and they actvely are in South African marketplace, I can tell you that today, they actually are actively doing it,so its a good thing that’s occurring for Linux…
The widespread adoption of Linux is absolutely great for the community, interoperability is great for the community, virtualization is great for the community; making a self-serving deal that puts you on the "good" side of anti-Linux FUD is detrimental to the community. Right now, the former does not outweigh the latter.
Fix the agreement. Stafford Masie has promised Novell will be GPLv3 compliant, including altering the deal if necessary. Even before that, we had heard that the patent covenant was undergoing review for possible revision.
Do it, and let’s move on, this whole thing started over losing a 4800 server deal, so to date it has paid off more than 3-fold for Novell. Stop FUDding and get back to competing on technological merit, rather than using this deal as a competitive advantage:
(Stafford Masie during the CITI Forum Q&A)
So, OK, let me paint the scenario and you tell me if I’ve got the context of the question correctly.
So, in that big deal, whatever it was – Ubuntu and Novell, and not Microsoft and Novell, and would we then use this agreement as a competitive edge and come up against you. Yes and no, OK?
If the customer does believe that there’s issues, concerns, etc because they have Microsoft interoperability stuff, I think the agreement might give us an edge, but its not an exclusive edge, and thats why we want to encourage Shuttleworth and the folks to go and do what we did, investigate what we’ve done, don’t be fanatical about it, but take a look at it.
Now, there are… y’know, I kinda want to say a few things here, and I think we’ve created the platform for it – we will compete, and I think competition amongst Linux vendors is good, it needs to be there… but we need to be responsible in our competing, lets make sure that we don’t compete to the detriment of both of us, because there’s someone standing looking over our shoulders wanting that to happen in a certain way. Microsoft is in the Linux game now, but they wouldn’t love it more than for this Linux thing to just implode, ok, they’d love that to happen also.
It’s kinda win-win for them, so we need to be careful how we compete, now will we utilize this patent portfolio? No, in fact we provide protection related to that. We’ll never use it against another Linux company, we never have – you’ve competed with me in South Africa and I’ve never utilized my…my legal indemnification, etc etc to outcompete you, we dont do that.
In fact, we’ve made it pretty clear on the website that we believe competition between technologies shouldn’t be based on the potential legal liabilities and FUD, it should be based on the technology merits of those solutions, and that’s how we want to compete.
Novell isn’t using their patent portfolio against other Linux companies, that is true. By virtue of this deal and their FUD, they are using Microsoft’s patent portfolio against other Linux companies, I fail to see the distinction.
Addendum (Roy):
Be sure to read the mind of the skeptics.
Anyway, what I continue to find completely baffling about this is why these companies are getting their SLES licenses from Microsoft. I know that they have an agreement and so they need to feed it, but why would Novell ever want to have its biggest competitor selling its software? And, in particular, why should existing customers now get their SLES licenses through Microsoft? From a purely practical standpoint, it looks a bit daft.
What I cannot help wondering, having come across a worrisome headline, is whether Microsoft will ‘pull an Oracle’ and offer discounted Linux support one day. You would have to agree that the following raises a brow: “Microsoft names three takers for its Linux support“.
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Posted in Novell at 12:18 am by Shane Coyle
A couple of Human Resources notes from Novell.
Coming
Hubert Mantel Back at Novell
I had more than 1 year of time to think about my future and came to the conclusion that the thing I’m most interested in still is Linux.” During an exclusive interview to Data Manager Online and pc-facile, SuSe co-founder confirms – after he left one year ago – he’s back at Novell since the beginning of December.
Going
Robert O’Callahan leaving for Mozilla
I am leaving Novell at the end of the year. Starting from the beginning of January I will be working as a contractor for the Mozilla Corporation.
Reshuffling
Volker Smid Appointed Novell EMEA President
Novell has appointed a new president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), the company said Thursday.
Volker Smid, who has been Novell’s central European general manager since May 2005, will supervise Novell’s sales and consulting business for EMEA. Smid replaces Tom Francese, who took over as Novell’s executive vice president for worldwide sales in October.
Update (Roy):
More questions raised, as well as minor reshuffling.
Change in Directors or Principal Officers
Item 5.02 Departure of Directors or Certain Officers; Election of Directors; Appointment of Certain Officers; Compensatory Arrangements of Certain Officers.
On December 12, 2006, the Compensation Committee of the Board of Directors of Novell, Inc. made a cash award to Joseph A. LaSala, Jr., Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Novell, outside of the previously disclosed Annual Bonus Program for Executives. The award of $350,000 was made in recognition of exceptional contributions made by Mr. LaSala.
I have also stumbled upon an essay titled “Novell charts unknown waters but keeps on sailing“, which reminded me of its poor outlook.
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12.19.06
Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Humour, Intellectual Monopoly, Microsoft, Patents at 2:34 pm by Shane Coyle
I’m a little under the weather, although it has actually been an unseasonably warm December here on Long Island, but I did get a kick out of this and wanted to share.
It’s regarding the Google Patent search beta that came out the other day, admittedly I was fixated on it for hours, well- I wasn’t alone. Network World’s Paul McNamara stumbled upon what seemed to be an odd Microsoft patent
That there is a patent on file with the United States Patent Office for something called a “butt hinge with integrally formed butt straps” is odd enough — and in a patently obscene sort of way, too.
That the patent is held by the world’s most famous software company makes one wonder exactly what the limits might be on Microsoft’s well-publicized efforts to diversify its product portfolio.
Well, Microsoft’s representatives got back to Paul and were able to identify that the attribution to Microsoft is an error: "Hi Paul: Just got a confirmation from clients (Editor’s note: That’s Microsoft) that, as expected, the patent for a door hinge is not from Microsoft. Microsoft will contact the Patent Trademark Office to get the information fixed. Thanks for holding on."
The article also mentions a previous instance where Microsoft was incorrectly attributed with a "hybrid apple" patent. No, not that kind.
It’s good to know my upcoming Butt Hinge project has nothing to fear from Redmond, if only I was sure about my GNU/Linux Live CD.
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