12.27.11

Links 27/12/2011: Linux 3.2 RC 7, GNOME 3.3.3

Posted in News Roundup at 4:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Increasing Number of Complaints About Increasing Number of Gates-funded AstroTurf Groups for Education ‘Reform’

Posted in Bill Gates at 5:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A somewhat belated roundup of reports about what Bill Gates is doing to privatise (and perhaps monopolise) US education

THE school/public education agenda has been mentioned briefly in our daily links, but we have not touched on this subject in relation to the Gates Foundation for quite some time.

Things have not changed for the better because Gates’ ego is still funding AstroTurf groups that do the opposite of that they claim to be doing. Many of these are funded by Bill Gates for his selfish agenda and teachers bemoan this over and over again. To quote a fairly recent observation (we catch up chronologically):

Since the last board meeting, it was announced by Norm Rice of the Seattle Foundation that he was funding TFA, Inc. This is the same foundation that in 2010 received almost $6M in grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The same Bill Gates who last year gave TFA, Inc. $2.5M to open up an office in Seattle.

We are hoping that people who work for Gates on this agenda will realise how evil this agenda is. Many such people are already fleeing. To quote a recent article:

Hilary Pennington, director of education, postsecondary success, and special initiatives in the foundation’s United States program since 2007, told grantees in an e-mail last month that she would leave her position by spring 2012 to “get closer to work on the ground.” Pennington, who has led the foundation’s gradually intensifying involvement in issues of college completion, productivity and technological innovation, said in announcing her departure that she was optimistic that the foundation’s work would continue because “I am so confident about the strength of the strategy, the [postsecondary success] team, and our grantees and other partners.”

We wrote about more such departures before. Going back to examples of Gates’ privatisation of education systems:

Our state PTA is busy promoting charter schools along with the Gates backed League of Education Voters, Stand for Children and DFER.

Some of those front groups were covered here before and their Gates ties shown.

Gates’ folks are trying to bash and silence the truth, which does not have as much PR funds (if any) allocated to it. Teachers, parents and students/pupils are helpless in this battle. Here is a relevant article on this subject:

The New York Times recently ran a story portraying the Gates Foundation as the puppeteer of American education policy, bribing or bullying scholars and politicians into dancing as it desires. Rick Hess, of the American Enterprise Institute, feels that the story misrepresented his position on the potentially corrupting influence of foundations, making it sound as though he were referring to the Gates Foundation in particular when in fact he was referring to the impact of foundations generally.

Front groups are easy to expose, but they keep changing names and “one of their wealthiest financiers, Bill Gates” (to quote this article) funds the shell du jour as long as it promotes his agenda. To quote further:

But, this is how the PTA has worked over the past few years in our state. From my experience as a Legislative Chair during the last legislative session, which was an example of top down decision making using typical ed reform manipulative language to push the agenda of one of their wealthiest financiers, Bill Gates, who has funded the National PTA for $2M as well as the Washington State PTA this year for $191,000 and is a big proponent of charter schools, I have seen how far away the Washington State PTA has drifted from its’ roots as an advocate for parents, teachers and students. The PTA in our state no longer represents all or even many of the parents, teachers or students which explains one of the reasons for the quick growth of Parents Across America.

There is more here:

Besides the fact that they have received a few mil from Gates?

Part of Washington State PTA’s mission is to be a relevant resource for families and communities, and a strong advocate for the well-being and education of every child. Charters could promote school choice, flexibility and local autonomy, and give communities new options.

As critics of Gates point out, the PR/spin that their PR agents keep plating and seeding (yes, they hired many and spend hundreds of millions on it) keep bubbling to the surface, arguably showing the futility of fighting against this sort of corruption. With Melinda Gates pushing her agenda in the Huff & Puff (quite frankly as usual) we constantly see that PR and money can trump truth. Most people out there still think that Gates reformed his behaviour.

This is class war. They don’t use guns or anything heavy in this war, but they loot massively and enslave people around them, including teachers. Mind this blog post “Privatize Everything! Say the 21st Century Pirates”. It says quite shrewdly that:

Gates, along with hedge funds, are pushing an agenda of privatizing public schools, and funding a PR push in support of that cause with films like “Waiting for Superman” and the NBC “Education Nation” that included a panel with the title “Does Education Need a Katrina?“.

Diane Ravitch’s book review with the heading “Class Warfare” addresses some of these issues and the title is not so strong on a relative basis.

“One of the chairs of the Gates Foundation is quoted: “There’s class warfare, all right,” Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”” (source)

Quoting further:

The wealthiest American is Bill Gates, who in recent months has attacked teacher tenure, teacher pay schedules, seniority layoffs and smaller class sizes. The Gates Foundation is now actively pursuing those regressive goals: it provided significant resources to promoting the anti-teacher, anti-union propaganda movie “Waiting for Superman.” (Gates himself appeared in “Waiting for Superman” as an ‘educational expert.’) Since the second wealthiest American, Warren Buffet, does his philanthropy through the Gates Foundation, he is effectively aligned with Gates’ educational agenda.

[...]

Teachers and teacher unions have not sought out this class warfare. To the contrary, the American Federation of Teachers made an effort to establish a dialogue with Bill Gates, inviting Gates to address our last national convention in Seattle. This overture had its critics, but it would be a serious mistake for unions to talk only to those who agreed with us. By the same token, we need to be honest about the results of our efforts at dialogue: Gates has become outspoken in his anti-teacher pronouncements. There’s not much left to discuss when he assumes such a posture.

It’s getting quite serious and OWS protesters should not lose sight of Gates. He uses the most PR to whitewash his past and he knows why he is doing it. The population increasingly recognises its real enemies. They are domestic ones.

One of Gates’ PR angles is that Khan Academy is a model to be mimicked, but as several bloggers and others writers point out [1, 2], that is just a load of nonsense. The PR offensive has not got the support of experts. As one critic of the foundation points out, however, Bill and Melinda are just preaching, they are not listening. To further illustrate this point: “Like tens of thousands of folks (soon to be millions), I now follow Melinda Gates on Twitter. I also follow her husband’s Tweets.” They never respond, they just instruct. It’s more like tyranny, even dictatorship, to use words from the previously covered op-ed. As another critic points out:

Melinda tweeting is not going to solve the ‘communication problem’ at the Gates Foundation. Twitter is talking. There is no way to ensure Melinda is listening to the small dairy farmer in Kenya who probably works too many hours to use Twitter anyway.

The Gates family can screw up the education system for their profit and not face the consequences, let alone the liability. As Alliance Magazine put it some months ago:

It’s a truism that foundations lack accountability – unlike (democratic) governments and companies, which are at least in theory accountable to voters and shareholders. The justification for this – in the eyes of the philanthropy world, and presumably the wider world – is the assumption that foundations probably do quite a lot of good, and almost certainly don’t do any harm.

Bill and his wife are meanwhile celebrating on the taxpayers’ ATM (half a trillion dollars per year for education) with permission from Duncan, their accomplice, whose role in this we covered here before. Here is more on that:

In anticipation of the new NCLB initiative rolled out yesterday (my response in the making), Arne Duncan announced recently a new corporate ed reform money maker called “Digital Promise,” which promises to fill the pockets of some of Duncan’s favorite techie sidekicks who are already lining up at Duncan’s “innovation-inspiring” federal ATM machine at the U. S. Department of Ed. Take Reed Hastings, for instance (please), whose rattle-trap outfit, NetFlix, is beginning to flicker toward extinction just as Hastings moves into the edu-biz in a big way.

What can be done to stop Gates, his AstroTurfers, the PR machine, and corrupt politicians who let him take over childrens’ minds? It is a truly serious issue even if it is not purely tech-related. █

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Bill Gates Labelled “Public Health Dictator”

Posted in Bill Gates, Patents at 5:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“Gates has created a huge blood-buying operation that only cares about money, not about people.”

–AIDS organisation manager, December 2009 (New York Times)

Summary: Criticisms of monopolisation in the medical field and another appointment from a drug company, consisting and reinforcing yet another conflict of interest

THE NEW empire of Bill Gates seeks to monopolise more areas of life, not just software. Some of the tricks are familiar, including the attack on dissent and marginalisation of competition.

We have a wiki page for the uninitiated and today we present a recent article where Gates is called “public health dictator” because he ought to be called that. To quote a weak response to it:

Last week, Laura Freschi and Alanna Shaikh published a piece in Alliance magazine that raised some interesting and thought-provoking question about the role of the Gates Foundation in setting the global health agenda. They conclude that Gates is becoming a “public health dictator” because of his financial resources and the power and influence that come as a result. They are, of course, not the first to complain about Gates’s focus on technological solutions to global health challenges. Some of the most recent grumblings were in response to the Foundation’s “reinvent the toilet” campaign this year, but similar concerns have been voiced for years. The Foundation places too much emphasis on technological innovation and “quick fixes”; their undue influence diverts funding from other priorities; their goals are not realistic. These are all valid concerns which deserve to be voiced (heck, we have already written about it here), particularly in a field where nearly everyone has a different opinion on how problems should be solved.

This article is actually somewhat of a coverup, but we link it here anyway. It is worth noting that around the same time a bully called Tachi, the head of health, left the foundation, only to be replaced by another guy with a conflict of interest. To quote:

Mundel succeeds Tachi Yamada, who came from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to run the Gates Foundation global health program.

He comes from Novartis, which we previously wrote about in relation to Gates. One point that we emphasises is that such appointments help sell products (essentially patents) under the disguise of being ‘charity’ or goodwill. As a Reuters report helps show, Novartis gets embedded in Gates’ bed even further:

The Gates Foundation, belonging to Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda, could poach Novartis’s head of global development, a Swiss newspaper reported on Sunday, citing two sources.

This will be good news for Novartis, which will now have one of its people lobby politicians to buy drugs at taxpayers’ expense. He can lobby them not as a corporate head but as “charity” guy. Wonderful loophole and guess who is investing (for profit) in those drug companies? Bill Gates of course. This not only affects healthcare but also other areas where Bill Gates became a dictator. Another example will be given in the next post. █

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Novell Products Dumped Quickly

Posted in Mail, Novell at 5:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Novell’s portfolio fails to survive

Summary: A roundup of December stories where companies or institutions dump Novell and also make it known

THE tracking of Novell’s demise is made hard by the fact that it went private. It is also made hard by the fact that companies which dump Novell need not make it publicly known. But we do our best to collect anecdotal evidence and this post will supply some.

Here is an article from December that says:

The new Active Directory, which took the place of Novell to store network accounts, became visible this year. Users now log on to campus computers using an Active Directory account and their Netpass username and password.

Here is another one:

The much-maligned Novell GroupWise e-mail program may soon become a thing of Smith’s past: ITS is considering switching to the Google Apps for Education platform. Smith has used GroupWise since September 2000, though over the years many students have expressed dissatisfaction with the program’s organizational system and size limitations.

Here is a massive loss for Novell:

The council is replacing Novell’s Groupwise collaboration tool and Microsoft’s word processing and spreadsheet software for its 3,500 staff, it said in a statement. The switch is expected to save the council £3 million over the next four years.

They are getting rid of GroupWise:

Research by the council’s IT department earlier this year found two viable options for the shift: Microsoft Office 365 and Google. A tender was put out in July to find a company to help migrate the council from its current Novell GroupWise system to one of those two solutions, including supplying licensing, and the winner was the London-based Google reseller Cloudreach.

In LA, after a fuss was made, it turns out that:

Google will pay up to $350,000 per year for those employees to use that system, which is run by Novell, a competitor.

It took a lot of smears against Google to achieve this. Proprietary Groupwise is not necessarily more privacy-respecting than Google. They ought to just deploy Free software, instead. Here is more background information [1, 2], which meets the chagrin of Microsoft boosters. It should not be about security because proprietary software that is native has security problems too. Anyway, it may be too late to reverse this decision. Groupwise might live another day in LA. As for Novell’s other proprietary software, one article says that in provisioning “Key vendors dominating this market space include Oracle Corp., IBM Corp., CA Technologies, and Novell Inc.” How long for? Attachmate is too passive.

Regarding proprietary identity management, Novell is mentioned here. Remember that Attachmate does not promote Novell products, so those pieces of software are in a terminal state right now.

Quoting one last new article:

Licensing revenues are also derived from arrangements in which we enable third party technology, such as solutions from Novell, to be used with our OEM partners’ products.

At Novell, proprietary software is what everything is about, except the incubation known as OpenSUSE. █

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Update on OpenSUSE: Novell/Microsoft Incubator for Free Labour

Posted in Microsoft, Novell, OpenSUSE at 4:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Some bits and pieces about OpenSUSE, which paints as “community” and “open” a rather proprietary product (SLE*) with Microsoft patent tax

OpenSUSE has been fairly quiet in December, with the exception of a new release. Google’s funds for the projects have dried up by now (with exceptions) and some fixes/adaptations are late to arrive, so some people complained that OpenSUSE did not work on their hardware. There are derivatives/flavours like OpenSUSE Edu Li-f-e 12.1 or even this more obscure Live CD:

The third version of the Oyranos Colour Management LiveCD is based on openSUSE-12.1 and will run on x86_64 compatible PC´s. I placed the ISO image yesterday after some preparations on the better accessible SourceForge site for download. The CD project starts into a instantly colour managed desktop, which is unique under Linux.

SUSE is looking for free testers for SLE* and various for-profit products [1, 2] including fog and proprietary. Uwe writes about SUSE Manager and Studio for instance. The OpenSUSE project is just an incubator for Microsoft Linux. Volunteers will sooner or later realise this and for one of them, Sascha, the reports are going PDF-only, which is a step back. Other SUSE enthusiasts who install the distribution may also realise that they can get the same elsewhere, without the Microsoft association. There are site changes ongoing at the incubator. There are hardly any SUSE bloggers left there (not active ones anyway). “Let’s start to get an openSUSE running on the machine,” wrote Danny, who later posted some progress updates [1, 2] that appeared in Planet SUSE. It’s also where Masim’s posts on openSUSE [1, 2, 3] have been appearing. The number of active SUSE bloggers declined over the years and it shows. We just don’t have much to say and show about the project anymore. █

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The Exodus of Novell Executives and Life After Novell

Posted in Novell at 4:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: What Novell’s heads, including the CEO, are up to after the group disbanded

NEWS from December was interesting in the sense that it had many examples of departing Novell staff.

Several years ago we wrote about Masie, who left the company quite shortly (9 months) after it had signed the deal with Microsoft — a deal which he tried to defend. His role at Novell is still mentioned in the news.

Here is the appointment of one who used to work for Novell:

Prior to that, he spent 14 years at Novell after the company acquired Excelan where he was a lead developer for the LANWorkplace product, the first suite of TCP/IP utilities for DOS and Windows.

This goes a very long way back. How about David Bradford?

That’s something Fusion-io had, and even if you go back to 1985, when I joined the executive team at Novell, we had a very broad market we were going after. Every corporation on planet earth needed what Novell sold, and by the same token, I believe every corporation needs what HireVue sells. I’m very excited to be here.

Mark Cuban also used to work for Novell. To quote:

3:08 p.m.- MC says he first learned to program on Ramix (not sure I spelled that right) at Indiana University then started using Basic, C++ and a number of other programming languages and put them to use working for Novell out of college and eventually started MicroSolutions (which he later sold for millions of dollars).

Here is Danny Young from Google speaking about his time at Novell:

He also worked at Novell Inc. and Intel Corp. both in the early ’90s.

The most coverage came from Wolfe. “Wolfe lost his post as president of Novell Americas after the company was bought out.”

Timothy Wolfe got a new job [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19]. Probably a step up for him. To quote one article:

Wolfe is a 20-year executive with IBM IBM Latest from The Business Journals From Intel to Cuomo and the unions, a year of big dealsBob Dutkowsky: Enjoys helping others succeedAustin gets on tech bandwagon, steers it among leaders Follow this company and mostly recently was North American president of software company Novell Novell Latest from The Business Journals DBJ Tech Watch for Tuesday 12/20: News of Google, Oracle, Facebook, Dish and moreMicrosoft: Novell lacks evidence in antitrust caseAnother Microsoft antitrust trial after Utah jury deadlock? Follow this company .

Here is another former Noveller moving on:

Skok joined Matrix from SilverStream Software, which he founded in June 1996. Prior to its July 2002 acquisition by Novell, SilverStream was a public company that had reached a revenue run rate in excess of $100M, with approximately 800 employees and offices in more than 20 countries around the world. His work as a value added investor is best known for helping JBoss take its Open Source business to a successful exit with its sale to Red Hat, and for helping AppIQ, Tabblo and Diligent Technologies, which have all had successful exits, from their inceptions to their acquisitions by HP and IBM.

The CEO of Novell, who was pretty much unemployed for a while (as we noted quite recently) joins IntraLinks as CEO. This did not receive much coverage. “IntraLinks (NYSE: IL), a leading provider of critical information exchange solutions, today announced the appointment of Ronald W. Hovsepian as the company’s new president and chief executive officer effective as of the close of business on December 15, 2011. Mr. Hovsepian was also appointed as a director to the company’s board of directors.”

Here is another page about it. This hardly received any coverage. Another former CEO of Novell finds a new place to work (“Former Novell CEO Robert Frankenberg”). This received more coverage than the Hovsepian appointment. One of the former heads of SUSE becomes CEO as well. “The new company has been set up by the founder of the original ownCloud project, Frank Karlitschek, and Markus Rex, a former SUSE/Novell executive who left Novell at the time of the Attachmate acquisition.” They also received good capital to start with.

Beetar, another manager who worked at Novell, has moved on. She becomes MD at Experian:

Before joining Experian SA, Beetar was country manager for computer software firm Novell. She previously held senior positions at Oracle and MWeb.

More here

As an aside, there is a family dispute of a Novell salesman surfacing on the Web (Pamela vs. Walter Wilson). Incidentally, an obituary was posted this month for Daniel B. Wilson, who had also worked for Novell. Here is the personal story of one with Novell experience:

Dubey established a campus-wide high speed network using fiber optic cables and structured cabling to connect LANs installed in various departments. He designed and developed online computer applications in client server mode using the Oracle 7 database and PowerBuilder 4.0 as a front end tool. He procured installed and commissioned LANs in various departments using Novell Netware 3.11.

So he deployed Novell long before they died. Novell is basically not totally dead. There are events at the Provo Novell Campus, but Novell’s days are numbered. Horace Dediu writes about the legacy of Novell:

It wasn’t until PC servers and server software like that from Novell and networking from 3COM became commonplace that mainframes and minis began to fade.

Novell is now important for legal reasons. To quote this new report:

Cooperation with our international counterparts is at an all-time high on enforcement matters. Virtually every day the division is in close contact with its counterparts all around the world on a variety of matters, including both investigations and policy matters. For example, with waivers from the parties, the division worked closely with the German Federal Cartel Office on an investigation into the acquisition of certain patents and patent applications from Novell by CPTN, marking the first significant merger enforcement cooperation the division had with Germany in twenty years.

Novell, having fought SCO in court, ended up giving Microsoft and Apple anti-Linux ammunition.

Over at Reuters we find out more new information about the purchase of Novell, specifically:

Late last year, Novell was sold to Attachmate Corp, owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo. More recently, Lawson Software Inc was acquired by GGC Software Holdings Inc in a deal spearheaded by banker Michal Katz.

This is also covered in [1, 2, 3]. One last article of interest says:

While it is commonly understood that the existence of network effects should figure prominently in the analysis of entry barriers in many technology-driven markets, this same dynamic may also play a role in antitrust standing analysis. In Novell v. Microsoft Corp., 505 F.3d 302 (4th Cir. 2007), the 4th Circuit affirmed a district court opinion holding that the maker of WordPerfect had antitrust standing to assert claims based on allegations that Microsoft, believing that WordPerfect constituted a middleware threat to its operating system monopoly, damaged the product by withholding interoperability information, coercing original equipment manufacturers into not licensing it, and requiring Novell to use Windows-specific technologies that degraded the performance of the product on other operating systems.

Although Novell was not a ­competitor or consumer in the personal ­computer operating system market, the court found that Microsoft’s anti-competitive conduct had potentially injured Novell by encouraging a network effect that would disadvantage Novell: “Microsoft’s use of its monopoly power in the operating-system market to foreclose the distribution channels for Novell’s applications…would have naturally tended to decrease Novell’s market share and consequently decrease the value of its applications.…This loss of market share could make a competing operating system featuring Novell’s office-productivity applications less attractive to consumers, harming that competing operating system’s potential to surmount the barrier protecting the Windows monopoly.” Id. at 316.

We ought to remember Novell as the company which once competed with Microsoft, then became an ally of Microsoft, and ultimately gave its patents for Microsoft to attack FOSS with. This is a managerial failure at Novell. People who used to work at Novell are still out there in other companies, but they are likely to be harmless there. Still, it is interesting to see what they end up doing. █

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SCO’s Front Page Advertises Microsoft Product

Posted in Site News at 4:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: SCO’s gift to Microsoft or simply an innocent coincidence

LAST night in IRC we discussed SCO and it turned out that their homepage now endorses and advertises Microsoft’s hype V, not System V. Several years ago Bruce Perens wrote that “Eric Raymond revealed a leaked email from SCO’s strategic consultant Mike Anderer to their management. The email details how, surprise surprise, Microsoft has arranged virtually all of SCO’s financing, hiding behind intermediaries like Baystar Capital.” █

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IRC Proceedings: December 26th, 2011

Posted in IRC Logs at 4:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Enter the IRC channels now

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