09.01.08
Posted in Asia, Europe, Free/Libre Software, Law, Microsoft, Patents, Virtualisation at 7:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Patents Draft Amendment in China
While software patents are not mentioned (not explicitly anyway) in the following draft amendment, alternations to policies are outlined. [via Andy Updegrove]
Less than three months after the State Council put its stamp on the patent law reform blueprint, the government yesterday submitted the draft amendment to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), the top legislature, for first reading.
[...]
Another important change is the proposed removal of the statutory requirement for all Chinese individuals and entities to first file applications in China for inventions made in the country. The revision would allow Chinese individuals and entities to file their patents for the first time in other countries, not necessarily China.
Intellectual Pirates Attack with Arms, Break the Law
Intellectual monopolies fancy labelling their customers “pirates”, but they are often blind to their own behaviour which includes theft (confiscation).
German Customs officials have raided several stands at this years IFA trade show in Berlin, including Emtec’s, MSI’s, and Xoro’s. The officials are acting on behalf of Sisvel, which has a stand in Hall 2.2 at this year’s IFA.
We wrote about this a few days ago and it turns out to be a violation of the law. [via Digital Majority]
Berlin Court condemns Sisvel’s IFA seizures as ‘illegal’
[...]
Today Sisvel, Europe’s very own “patent troll”, was given a serious blow by a Berlin Court. Sisvel convinced German public prosecutors to provide some helping hands in pressing companies in the mp3 audio field to take licenses under patents, owned by Philips and other companies.
So, while they pretend to be enforcing the law by taking it into their own hands, what they actually do is break the law, unlike their innocent victims, whom they rob over software patents.
TiVoization, Software Patents, or Both?
TiVo’s affinity for patents is a problem which was brought up in the past. This unnecessary and confrontational habit carries on, which leads to more questions about the company’s commitment to the GPL’s philosophy (TiVo uses the Linux kernel).
Shares in TiVo dropped 23 cents, or 2.9 percent, to $7.73 in extended trading. Before the earnings report the stock had risen 5.7 percent to close at $7.96.
During a conference call, interim Chief Financial Officer Cal Hoagland said TiVo will face increased expenses in the current quarter, including holiday-related marketing and costs related to an ongoing patent battle with Dish Network Corp. A Sept. 4 court date has been set as TiVo seeks to collect on the $94 million it has been awarded in damages.
Akamai is another company that uses GNU/Linux and is not shy about patents.
Microsoft
A quick little search in Google reveals quite a few Microsoft patents that may contain the term “.NET”. Fortunately, for a few consecutive weeks now, KDE has not committed changes that contribute to Mono. It’s important to remember where Microsoft comes from.
The hypocrisy of Microsoft’s position in this issue is blatant – in 1983, Gates complained about theft of intellectual property:
“Imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name…without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art.” (Gates)
Meanwhile, Microsoft continued to build upon the PC-DOS / MS-DOS product with intellectual property stolen from others. An example of this can be found in Microsoft’s theft of intellectual property belonging to Stac Corporation:
“During that conversation, Mr. Chase admitted that, during Microsoft’s “normal due diligence process,” Microsoft had concluded that the DoubleSpace data compression utility of the MS-DOS 6.0 operating system software infringed Stac’s ’009 patent, one of the two patents in suit.” (Stac Electronics vs. Microsoft Corporation).
Microsoft was perfectly aware in advance that what they were doing violated a Stac patent, and yet they continued on their way. Ignoring the Stac patent afforded Microsoft the ability to add a useful feature to MS-DOS in a timely manner; the DoubleSpace technology in MS-DOS 6.0 was one of its major features (Huxford), especially for those with older or portable systems.
Despite its age, this article as a whole is recommended reading. It’s a story about a ‘pirate’ that grew and then started calling everybody else ‘pirates’. It’s the definition of hypocrisy at its finest. Microsoft also shouts out “monopoly” or "privacy offenses" at Google now. █
“Hey, Steve, just because you broke into Xerox’s store before I did and took the TV doesn’t mean I can’t go in later and steal the stereo.”
–Bill Gates, Microsoft
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Law, Microsoft, Security, Videos, Vista, Windows at 7:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Yahoo Finds Google After Escaping a Villain
For Yahoo and Google, things appear to be working out pretty well despite Microsoft's disruption via lobbying arms and hypocritical accusations.
Google says its web advertising deal with Yahoo is on schedule and will not be derailed by US anti-trust scrutiny.
It is a tad amusing that Microsoft empowered the very same competitors it sought to harm when it first approached Yahoo! It’s poetic justice. Just to reiterate, Microsoft may have used illegal proxies to weaken Yahoo and it also does, for a fact, use AstroTurfers, which it hires via the LawMedia Group (one proxy among others) to shoot down this Yahoo/Google collaboration.
Growing Pains on the Cloud and the Desktop
There are other reasons for Microsoft to fear Google. It’s not just search and advertising, which are key ingredients of profitable cloud computing. Google employs the necessary skill set and assets which enabled it — via an acquisition — to dominate Web video and secure a good position in software as a service (SaaS). It also collaborates with Salesforce now. Here is a new article about this challenge to Microsoft’s already-lost dominance.
Cloud computing about to rain on Microsoft parade
Work from home and get paid to log on to YouTube — that’s life in “the cloud”.
The cloud, or cloud computing, is the latest phrase on the lips of every IT geek, and they say it’s transforming our lives by quantum leaps and bounds.
Microsoft’s appointment of Jerry Seinfeld was mentioned in [1, 2, 3, 4]. John Dvorak does not believe that this is going work.
So the question becomes not whether the campaign will stink, but how bad.
I have come up with three possibilities. The kindest one would be “just stinks.” After that comes “stinks to high heaven,” followed by the frightful “What are they thinking!?”
[...]
So we’ll all await these new messages from Microsoft knowing that they will probably not stink to high heaven, but merely just stink.
Hammered by Non-Free Software
An interesting new case sheds some light on the legality of lock-in and its accompanying abuse of power. It could serve as precedence affecting Microsoft et al.
AN IT company is taking on Medicare, suing it for anti-competitive conduct and breaches of the Trade Practices Act.
Thelma Pty Ltd, a subsidiary of technology company ICS Global, has filed a statement of claim in the Federal Court, alleging Medicare has misused taxpayer funds by replicating its computer program and offering it free to those in the private health sector.
ICS Global is also suing Medicare for misusing its market power and for predatory pricing.
The War in Iraq
It’s not what you think. A tradition of back doors and poor engineering at Microsoft is causing Iraqi authorities to
lose control of their computer systems. This must be why armies across the world gradually migrate to GNU/Linux (e.g. Turkey, Germany, US DoD). It’s just common sense
It is his unit’s lone computer, highlighting the country’s vulnerability to a community of Iraqi hackers defacing websites and attempting to hack into sensitive internal networks.
Iraq’s government is engaged in a bloody struggle against al-Qaeda, and its computers make a prime target for global terror networks that have added hacking to their arsenal.
“We could have the most powerful anti-hacking force in the world, but we’d still have no computers, so we couldn’t do anything,” says Ali Hussein, one of 12 computer science graduates added to the cybercrime team last month. “The government thinks about guns, tanks and raiding houses. Hackers just aren’t a priority.”
Regarding this issue of poor security, the other day we wrote about editors who are messing with article headlines. A reader has just sent us this possible new example from the news (“Worm on NASA Space Station Underscores Spread of Online Gaming Threats”).
The reader explains: “Here’s another example of article titles getting fiddled, presumably by MSFTers. Online gaming gets the blame in the title, even though the body clearly points out that this is a Windows vulnerability.
“NASA has no business running Windows on any missions. It was on a notebook computer — for now — but even that’s unacceptable: Space missions are not the place to decide that bad engineering is acceptable. That’s fine for the corporate board rooms, where ideology trumps profit, but the Microsoft effect of apathy toward bad engineering needs to stay out of life-or-death environments. It’s already killing patients, let’s not start to kill healthy astronauts, too.”
Request for Information
This is a kind request of behalf of a reader/researcher.
If any of our readers can find an article from a few years ago (2-5) defining the Microsoft effect, that would be helpful. The author even named the type of cognitive dissonance going on. Basically it’s a form of sour grapes: the Windows people have sucks, so there for all other systems suck just as much.
The article may be from pseudonym “Paul Murphy”, but there’s no certainty that it is the same person or people that now use the pseudonym. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Windows at 6:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
It seems to be running Microsoft Windows
A few years ago, FAA chose Microsoft Windows for its server systems.
The FAA is implementing the Stratus servers, which use Intel Xeon 2.8 MHz large cache MP processors and support the Microsoft Windows operating system, at control centers in Atlanta and Salt Lake City.
FAA is making a lot of headlines at the moment; it did last year, too. The latest suggests that there are serious holes.
Most of the problem is that the FAA has just two computing systems, one in Atlanta and one in Salt Lake City, to deal with the whole of the US. There was no redundancy, or enough different computers and communication channels to handle the same workload in an emergency.
If the FAA was a power company and it ran its operations in the same way it would be fined hundreds of thousand dollars a day.
Here is the latest incident, which led to some thinking and maybe an investigation.
According to an internal FAA document, the system, called the National Airspace Data Interchange Network, crashed on Thursday and caused in 134 departure delays. The Salt Lake City system also took over but had problems with the high queue level, the document said. The system also failed in June 2007.
Here is the older issue [expired].
AMR Corp.’s American Airlines spokesman Tim Wagner acknowledged the computer troubles and said the nation’s largest carrier experienced about 50 cancellations on the East Coast, with LaGuardia departures being hit the hardest.
On the brighter side of things, FAA seems to be rejecting the latest version of Windows.
The Federal Aviation Administration plans to bar contractors who administer the air traffic controllers exam from using Windows Vista-based PCs.
Those who are responsible for IT have actually considered GNU/Linux by now.
Bowen said he’s in talks with the aviation safety agency’s main hardware supplier, Dell Computer, to determine if it could deliver Linux-based computers capable of accessing Google Apps through a non-Microsoft browser once the FAA’s XP-based computers pass their shelf life.
Here is a personal account [expired].
The story had a certain flair. In early March, the chief information officer of the Federal Aviation Administration, David Bowen, was reportedly considering forsaking Microsoft Windows and Office in favor of the Linux operating system and the Web-based Google Apps Premium office suite.
There has been no word on this subject since then, so what will it be? █
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Posted in Africa, Free/Libre Software, FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Open XML, Windows at 6:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Fear and loathing of innocent gnus
Microsoft loves to claim that GNU/Linux does not exist. Where it exists, Microsoft pretends that it’s just ‘pirated’ Windows running and we recently covered such propaganda from Ina Fried and CNET [1, 2]. Kenya now seems quite likely a similar example.
Whenever Microsoft announces price drops, believe not the pitch about “poor students” and “to reduce piracy”. When and where Microsoft reduces its prices, it’s often because of Free software, which gains attraction that Microsoft is trying to stop.
There are at least two articles out there at the moment which claim Microsoft discounts in Kenya are intended to reduce copyright infringement. Microsoft compares this to the violent activity which is piracy. The original article pitches the news just like some obedient PR people from Microsoft rather than address the real market dynamics and share the details that Microsoft is not willing to talk about. The first post/article is a good example of this.
Microsoft’s plan to combat piracy in Kenya is pretty simple, really. Instead of trying to sue it away, they’re lowering prices to make Microsoft software more affordable, according to an IDG report.
Cherish the mercy of Microsoft. It prefers not to sue poor people.
This links to the IDG article, which resides in Network World.
But Ndung’u said that the corporation has developed a pricing structure for cyber cafés that requires them to pay US$10 per desktop annually.
Well, well…
It was widely publicised a while ago that cafés in Kenya were moving to GNU/Linux [1, 2, 3]. It’s not so much about so-called “piracy” then; it’s not about goodwill. It’s about being more competitive and reduce adoption of Free software. In other words, now they try dumping of Non-free software (or cheap giveaways) and they call it “fighting piracy”, not “fighting GNU/Linux”. They cast usage of GNU/Linux as something illegal that they kindly try to put an end to.
Why can’t Microsoft simply permit the Kenyan people to have freedom with Free(dom) software? It’s the same in South Africa where a new managing director has just been appointed. It has been a messy affair there [1, 2].
Need it be repeated that Microsoft allegedly blackmailed Kenya for OOXML support [4]? █
____
[1] Kenya: Copyright Board Takes Piracy War to Cyber Cafes
Cyber café operators within Nairobi are torn between legalising their Microsoft software operating system, shifting to Open Source Code or closing shop all together following the crack down on illegal software.
[...]
According to Mr Kasani, the software will manage all aspects of cyber café billing such as Internet time, printing, items, accounts, discounts, the programme will be across platform , it will be possible to run it on both Linux and Windows computers connected on the same cyber works.
[2] Linux cutting software costs in Kenya
Entrepreneurs in Kenya are putting Linux to work to cut costs and maximise profits as they look for new ways to bring computing to users.One of these entrepreneurs is Patrick Mathenge, CEO of Mullard Electronic Limited, a firm trading in hardware and software from its Mombasa Road offices. The company is distributing Linux software that can turn a single computer into up to 10 workstations.
[3] Open source opportunity on the road to Nairobi
Open source is facing a great opportunity in the cyber cafes of Nairobi, Kenya.
[4 ] Microsoft Denies Threatening to Withdraw Funding
[5 ] Kenya: How Software War Will Hurt Consumers
[6] Kenya Linux Group Challenges Procurement Policies
[7] Africa: ‘Microsoft is Imperialistic’ Says Open Source Advocates
[8] Swahili Blogosphere: State of education in Tanzania, M-Pesa and Open Source Movement in Kenya
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Posted in America, Antitrust, Asia, Europe, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 5:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Hungary
T
he Microsoft scandal in Hungary was last mentioned a few months ago. It’s part of a series of unacceptable events where the Hungarian people lose the most. Then came a formal complaint. McCreevy was soon assigned this job which came from Hungary, but that is a very bad appointment because McCreevy is a slave of the monopolists and maximalists. He won’t care about fair competition simply because he never does [1, 2].
“One must be left wondering what role Steve Ballmer and Charlie McCreevy played in this.”Now comes this article, which is written in Hungarian. Steve Ballmer is mentioned in it too, though not because of the egg-tossing incident.
Reader MinceR has provided us with a quick translation of the opening paragraph: “The court of Budapest decided it was legal to use the name of Microsoft in the public procurement procedure in which they wanted to buy software for 25 million HUF even though a few days earlier the Economic Competition Office decided it was a violation of neutrality of competition though this is apparently only a first instance decision.”
One must be left wondering what role Steve Ballmer and Charlie McCreevy played in this. It typically boils down to politics [1, 2].
Quebec
We also mentioned the Quebec lawsuit the other day. The latest articles about it include:
Who said nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft?
UAE
There’s still regression in the sense that those infamous memoranda of understanding [1, 2] are occasionally signed. The latest victim appears to be Ajman University, which seems to favour procurement based on handshakes and secret contracts, as opposed to proper judgment.
UAE. Furthering its commitment to transform the UAE into a knowledge based society, Microsoft Gulf today signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Ajman University of Science and Technology (AUST).
This is not procurement. This is sleaze, based on investigations into similar MoUs. █
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Posted in DRM, Microsoft, Mono, Novell at 4:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Another airline bites the digital ashtray
Ryanair seems to have been getting a little chummy with Microsoft recently. It’s quite the rarity, but a concerning one nonetheless.
The recent [4432 door-shutting] at the Democratic National Convention left a lot of GNU/Linux users very bitter. The same goes for football and the Olympic games [1, 2, 3]. Microsoft is using Silverlight to put a “no entry” sign on several Web sites, just as it used to do with ActiveX, which Novell still supports.
Ryanair seems to have recently approached Microsoft with the aim of ‘un-opening’ its Web site, making it closed and obscure by design and by choice. An article was published about this today.
Travolution understands that Microsoft and technology provider Navitaire have been asked to “proactively eliminate” screen scraping of the Ryanair site, primarily by blocking block access from other sites.
A spokesperson confirmed that the airline would attempt to block as many sites as possible – mirroring a strategy by Directline Insurance in the UK which claims its products cannot be found on any price comparison website.
Perhaps it’s related to something we were alerted about over the weekend. Reader maxstirner told us yesterday that “Ryanair requires silverlight!!”
Was this part of the arrangement? This must not be the future of the Web or even tiny portions of it, which Microsoft wishes to also saturate with DRM (as part of the specifications even). █
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Posted in America, Finance, Fraud, GNU/Linux, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, SCO, SLES/SLED at 5:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
A couple of days ago we wrote about alleged fraud at Novell. Having been taken to task, we hereby provide a more detailed analysis. It is difficult to find full articles because it dates back to early days of Novell SUSE, but we do our best nonetheless.
Here are some more details (than the last time) about Novell’s settlement in the class action lawsuit over securities fraud. Novell was never cleared and according to this article, “In its stipulation to the settlement, Novell said it had agreed to end the case in order to avoid further “protracted and expensive” litigation.” There is a little more information here and here.
A three-judge federal appellate panel on Tuesday ordered a drastically trimmed version of a long-running shareholders’ securities fraud lawsuit against Novell back to a Salt Lake City courtroom. In their unanimous decision, Judges Carlos F. Lucero,
Other bits of text such as this, this and this seem to suggest that proof was not sufficient.
In the securities fraud context, a plaintiff is held to a strict standard of pleading. Id. at 1124. Traditionally, plaintiffs alleging securities fraud had to meet the heightened pleading requirement of Rule 9(b)….
Grossman alleged violations of §§ 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act and common law fraud arising out of a seven percent decline in the price of Novell stock after the company announced disappointing earnings for the third quarter of its 1994 fiscal year. The District Court granted Novell’s motion to dismiss, ruling that Plaintiff had failed to allege a materially misleading statement or omission, that Novell had disclosed the risks of the merger, and that Plaintiff had not pled fraud with sufficient particularity.
At the time, it was not known that that Novell would report accounting errors a few years later. We’ll come to this in a moment.
Some time later, the following article from Law.com showed up. LaSala quit Novell several months ago, but the following story is interesting.
Last month, Novell gave LaSala a $350,000 bonus for “exceptional contributions” to the business — even as the company remained in the middle of an internal investigation into backdating that was launched in August.
Novell CEO Jack Messman and Chief Financial Officer Joseph Tibbetts Jr. both stepped down in June. The company said the departures had nothing to do with Novell’s ongoing backdating investigation. In 2002, Messman was the sole member of the company’s stock option grant committee for nonemployees, according to an SEC filing, a structure found at other companies under the backdating cloud, like Brocade Communications.
[...]
Journalist Pamela Jones, editor of Groklaw, a blog that closely follows open-source intellectual property disputes, mused that LaSala’s bonus was likely “related to the recent Microsoft deal.”
“Novell views the Microsoft partnership as a plus,” Jones wrote in an e-mail. “They may well feel that whoever worked on the deal deserves recognition. I don’t know if Mr. LaSala was involved, but it seems likely that the general counsel would be.”
[...]
Last fall The Recorder reported that Novell board members, including Sonsini, granted themselves stock options at dates other than the company’s annual meeting in 1997, 1999 and 2001. The 1999 grant came near a 17-month low in Novell’s stock price. The out-of-cycle grants practice deviated from shareholder-approved guidelines, but the board cited a 1991 stock plan for the authority to make the grants.
A Wilson Sonsini spokeswoman said at the time that Sonsini never exercised his 1999 grant.
The text speaks about Sonsini, which CNN wrote about in the context of scandals just after the deal with Microsoft.
Because Sonsini was on Brocade’s audit committee one year, he has also been named as a defendant in private class-action suits. Sonsini was on the board of Novell (Charts) too, which has initiated a voluntary audit of its options practices. Like all Novell directors, Sonsini received options himself. He never exercised his, according to a firm spokesperson, and they expired three months after he left the board in 2002. Sonsini declines to discuss either Novell or Brocade.
There is no ‘smoking gun’ here, but the vicinity to those scandals does not fare well.
One thing that was covered before is Novell's financial struggles just before the deal with Microsoft and throughout negotiations with them. Here is an article about it. Mind the date.
Novell Dogged by Delisting, Default Issues
[...]
Novell is not alone in the stock options scandal that has put more than 60 other public companies under scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission in recent months.
Both of the issues at hand, however, have further hurt the company’s lagging stock price and likely shaken clients of the second largest Linux vendor, Yankee Group Senior Analyst Laura DiDio told LinuxInsider.
“Anytime you get a delisting notice from Nasdaq it’s a big red flag,” she said. “It’s worrisome. It’s got to be worrisome to the customers, and that’s the big thing.”
So says a Microsoft shill (also ally of SCO), who works at the Microsoft-Yankee Group [1, 2]. We already know the routine [1, 2].
Sadly, also quoted is The Gartner Group, which is equally biased [1, 2, 3]. The entire article seems composed of these unreliable perspectives, which seems irresponsible for the writer, Jay Lyman, who now works in the 451 Group. It’s careless to just quote people that are close to Microsoft and even paid by Microsoft. At the time, Novell was also competing against Microsoft.
From around the same time, the following article can also be pulled. Novell was checking for backdating and therefore it seemed to have concealed its records.
Novell was only able to post preliminary fiscal third-quarter results Tuesday because it’s hired outside legal counsel to review its past stock option practices for indications of backdating, so the results it put out, it said, don’t reflect any adjustments that may have to be made.
More of the same from USA Today:
At high-tech firm Novell, for instance, a dozen current and former directors approved and backdated an unknown number of grants from 1997 to 2003 to inflate stock profits for officers and directors, according to a shareholders’ lawsuit.
Former Novell CEO and chairman Jack Messman left the firm last summer, and Novell has hired a law firm to investigate its backdating practices. The company says it may restate its financial statements and faces possible delisting from the Nasdaq Stock Market.
Here also:
Novell’s move comes as the SEC continues to widen its probe into potentially fraudulent stock options practices occurring now or in the past at U.S. companies and related to the backdating of options. By timing the granting of options to a low point in a company’s stock, an options recipient could buy shares cheaply and then resell them for a greater profit once the vendor’s share price rose.
Finally, we have covered this one before. It’s about stock option errors at Novell, lasting for about 10 years. Matt Aslett covered this also. it came after the settlement.
To conclude, what may have happened here is that Novell cooked its books in order stay on its feet. At the same time, it explored a deal with Microsoft that would inject hundreds of millions of dollars into the company. Maybe this was desperately needed.
Novell changed a lot since itsdeal with Microsoft. They were more careful the following year and watch how, according to The Wall Street Journal, Novell shifted its report from 2006 (before the Microsoft cash infusion) and published it in 2007 after selling some Microsoft SUSE coupons.
Bruce Lowry, a company spokesman, declined to say what the letters concerned, except that they were accounting-focused. Dana Russell, chief financial officer, said in a statement that the earnings release was postponed in “an abundance of caution” and “we look forward to completing our dialogue with the SEC.”
Novell delayed filing the 2006 annual report until May 2007 because of an internal investigation of whether its employees received backdated stock options.
One has to wonder what it is that Bruce Lowry saw, which made his escape Novell.
Just one week before the Microsoft deal, the following article shows up: Novell Board Gets Hit With Third Derivative Suit About Backdating
Reader trmanco has found the article after some discussions in the IRC channel. Sonsini is mentioned again.
The complaint focuses on options Novell board members gave themselves in October 1999, which came in addition to their regularly scheduled options. The “strike price” of the grants was a 17-month low. Filed by San Diego’s Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins, the suit also accuses the current top managers and board of directors and former CEO and chief financial officer of fraudulent accounting from 1999 to 2006.
The alleged backdating “has wreaked hundreds of millions of dollars of damages on Novell,” according to the suit.
[...]
A Wilson Sonsini spokeswoman noted Sonsini never exercised his October 1999 grant.
Again: this was published just one week before announcing the cash infusion from Microsoft. Was it a sellout of desperation, which came about because Novell was’nt buoyed by an acquisition of S.u.S.E., despite financial help from IBM?
TAKING STOCK Big news from Novell. The business-software company announced that it will acquire German Linux developer SuSE Linux AG for $210 million in cash. That’s not all — Novell added that IBM plans to invest $50 million in its stock, a big thumbs up from Big Blue. NOVL stock shot up more than 21 percent to $7.33, while IBM lost 54 cents to $89.14.
More on the events from the following year (including SCO) can be found here.
Novell is no angel and we wish to show this. Going further into the past, you can find Novell bribes.
The new chief of technology at the state Department of Children & Families resigned late Tuesday after agency officials learned he had been faulted by officials at a previous job in Ohio for accepting gifts from a technology company that had won a $1.9 million contract.
John R. Hurd was also criticized in a separate investigation by the Ohio Inspector General’s Office for appearing in several advertisements for the company, Novell, and allowing the company to run endorsements by him on its website.
Here is a similar story, which does not necessarily involve Novell. It’s the Salt Lake Olympics (winter games) scandal.
Reeling from a still-unfolding scandal involving charges that Utah won the right to host the Games by showering cash, gifts and other financial favors on International Olympic Committee (IOC) members and their families, this prosperous and booming city nestled against the Wasatch Mountains is undergoing a kind of civic and psychic crisis. “Utahans are very ashamed of what they are seeing…”
Some more details about it here:
In the early to mid-1990s, Utah by almost every economic indicator was on an express elevator. In the peak year of 1994, employment grew by 6.2 percent. Hundreds of high-tech firms led by giants such as Novell, WordPerfect and Iomega sprouted and grew along the Wasatch Front from Ogden to Provo, attracting a flood of migrants from other states. Two years ago, Nation’s Business magazine honored the Salt Lake City-Provo area as the No. 1 large metropolitan area to start and build a business.
So, what can be said about Novell? Is it really trustworthy? Does it seem like a company which in a good shape? █
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