Good bye, and don’t let the door smack you in the face
Novell’s top management seems not to be in a very stable state. This is just the latest example and it all happened very quietly. A belated inquiry seems to have revealed this weeks after it had actually happened.
NOVELL Asia-Pacific president Maarten Koster has relocated from Singapore to Sydney to oversee local operations after Australian manager Rob Mills resigned a few weeks ago.
Novell has had difficulty retaining senior executives.
How many more such departures complete escape the media’s radar?
No reason was publicly specified. Each time such a leader walks away, the replacement is sure to be Microsoft-sympathetic. It’s part of the job, it’s a requirement. Novell’s strategy now revolves around turning Free Software into Fee Software.
Reappointments are likely to reshape the corporate fabric of Novell, which is the next Corel in the sense that it becomes a Microsoft company shortly after it strays to GNU/Linux (soon to be offered a fat check from Microsoft to defect). Just look at the activities at Novell nowadays.
Last year Novell said that it was hiring .NET developers, amid times when there are just layoffs and offshoring.
Silverlight, Novell And Open Source
Even though the Silverlight community is still quite small and the examples produced by Microsoft developers are sparse, there’s a sense that Silverlight can win over designers and corporate .Net developers, more so than Adobe’s Flex has been able to do.
Novell is even extending the technology with Moonlight to run on Linux. Moonlight is Novell’s take on Silverlight for Linux technologies. With the help of Mono, a Novell tool, developers can run Silverlight applications on Linux.
Whenever Microsoft does not want to offer support for GNU/Linux (required to make some technology a de facto standard), it can approach Novell and use Novell’s resources to make something half-baked. Remember: it has to be half-baked in order for GNU/Linux to be perceived as unready for the enterprise. Novell then does Microsoft’s job, by proxy. It empowers Microsoft. █
EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced it has won the 2008 Microsoft Partner of the Year award for Business Process and Integration Solutions.
The company was chosen out of an international field of top Microsoft partners for delivering market-leading customer solutions built on Microsoft technology.
What we did not mention the other day is that the current (now former) CEO was actually thrown out, despite the fact that she has been there since day one… and until the hugely-successful IPO. Diane Greene became a threat to Microsoft, being the Linux enabler that her company had evolved to be.
“Wait and watch how VMWare deemphasises Linux over time, letting just KVM compete with the ‘Big Boys’.”Remember the story about Citrix, Microsoft’s Partner of the Year also in June 2008. Citrix grabbed Xen, which Red Hat, Ubuntu and many other GNU/Linux vendors depended on. XenSource too had gained Microsoft insiders prior to the deal and it even moved to Redmond [1, 2, 3].
Watch and learn how Microsoft interferes with or ‘hijacks’ its competitors, including Novell and Corel. Novell has already agreed, as part of its deal with Microsoft, to be a slave (guest) on Windows hosts in the datacentre.
Where are the regulators? Is this competition? It’s more like market perversion. Wait and watch how VMWare deemphasises Linux over time, letting just KVM compete with the ‘Big Boys’. It’s another Xen shuffle. All over again. █
he shrewd remarks from Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz continue to impress. He has become quite a vocal critic of the intellectual monopolies principle. The press still covers his unusual take at the moment, amid the creation of his new institute, which will be located nearby. Have a look at this:
US economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned that intellectual property rights are stifling innovation. According to the Intellectual Property Watch news service, the professor, who was awarded a 2001 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the relationship of information and markets, said at the opening of Manchester University’s Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation on Saturday that the intellectual property rights regime “closes down access to knowledge”. It was clear, he said, that specific restrictions applied particularly in the patent system.
Stiglitz criticised the current approach of treating copyright and patent rights as “intellectual property”. Intellectual property, he insisted, is public property and not something to be “owned”. It is difficult to prevent others from enjoying its benefits, he said, because it is fundamentally different to, and should not be compared to, the ownership of physical property. This approach creates monopoly power over knowledge that is often abused. Stiglitz gave as an example the current “patent thicket” in software, which results in anyone who writes a successful software program being sued for alleged patent infringements.
This is a very timely observation because yesterday there was this report about the verge of another embargo, which surely will benefit neither science nor consumers. Lawyers? Maybe.
It’s pretty unlikely this case will see Samsung handsets stopped at the US border. Most likely it will rumble on until both sides see an escape that saves face and a sum of money changes hands. So if this is a preliminary skirmish then Samsung has the most men still standing but the battle continues.
Will the world take a lesson from Professor Stiglitz? █
Corel has been a very bizarre company ever since its deal with Microsoft. Ambivalent, confused, aimless and reliant on other companies. That’s Corel.
It’s almost like Novell, only several years further down the line. The GNU/Linux identity of Corel is absolutely lost by now. As for Novell, that loss of identity is still 'work in progress'.
Corel produces software only for Windows. It’s still proprietary, just as Microsoft et al prefer for it to be (Fernando Cassia calls it a mistake). Corel was among the first parties to declare support for OOXML. It was a big deal at the time. Here is the latest from yesterday’s news:
Once ousted from the desktop by Microsoft, Wordperfect is back and better
One of the first widely-used office suites on PCs was Wordperfect. Then Microsoft muscled into the game and quickly its Office suite became the de-facto standard, edging out competitors.
[...]
WPO X4 includes a range of PDF capabilities including the ability to import, edit and export PDF documents – including scanned PDFs.
WPO X4 is distributed in South Africa by Workgroup. Corel product manager at Workgroup, Kevin George, says that as well as offering good PDF support, WPO X4 is also compatible with Microsoft Office 2007 files as well as Open Document Format (ODF), used by OpenOffice.org.
More interesting perhaps is Corel’s ‘bastard child’ called Xandros. Apart from signing a software patent deal with Microsoft, it has been up to other deals and ITJungle summarises.
The commercial Linux distribution business just got a little bit less diverse but perhaps a little stronger while IT Jungle was off on holiday last week when New York-based Xandros acquired fellow Linux distro Linspire for an undisclosed sum.
[...]
Xandros, you will remember, is the company that was founded in the wake of graphics and office automation software maker Corel’s attempt to become a Linux distributor a decade ago, which it spun out in 2001 as a separate entity. Xandros has attempted to create a Debian Linux that plays nicely with Windows and has some of the same look and feel of Windows, to which the company created its own Xandros File Manager to make something that works like the File Manager in Windows. Most recently, Xandros has become famous as the supplier of the Linux embedded in the popular ASUS Eee PC, a tiny little flash-based laptop PC. (I got my wife one of these for Mother’s Day, and she adores it because she can lug it around everywhere since it is no larger than a hardcover book. Which she also lugs around, now that I think about it.) Just as Xandros was cooking up the second edition of its Xandros Server variant last summer, it acquired Scalix, the HP-UX OpenMail groupware program that was spun out of Hewlett-Packard, ported to Linux, and open sourced.
This brings us back to H-P again, and particularly its attitude towards patents. We’ve covered this before. H-P fights for its patents and, not surprisingly, it’s apathetic towards GNU/Linux. If it’s ever offered as a choice, then it’s taxed by Microsoft [1, 2].
Scalix too plays the software patents game with Microsoft (it has roots in Microsoft's friend, Hewlett-Packard). It joined Xandros shortly after Microsoft and Xandros had signed that horrible deal. And lastly, speaking of H-P, recall what we wrote about GNOME the other day (further comments here) and remember that H-P and Xandros support Microsoft OOXML. To repeat this yet again, the concern here is that Microsoft tries to lock down the core of Free software inside Software Patent Prison, rendering it non-Free. To extent, this has already happened. █
BECTA was mentioned here many times before [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Its dealings with Microsoft are a classic case of abuse of public money, which soon becomes a resource for restricting consumers’ choice at their own expense — the expense of those affected (yes, adding insult to injury). This type of fiasco makes a characteristic common to many other secret deals, including those memoranda of ‘understanding’ which we’ve seen a lot of recently [1, 2, 3, 4].
If Becta, a UK government quango, published details of schools’ Microsoft spending, it “could give rise to an actionable breach of confidence by Microsoft against us,” it said. This was a “considerable risk”, it added. There has been growing disquiet in the public sector in the UK and Europe about the ways in which Microsoft might protect the monopoly it has in desktop software, and thus keep its prices artificially high, absorb public money that might be best spent elsewhere, and suppress innovative competitors from breaking through.
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Microsoft is embroiled in problematic negotiations over separate MOUs with Newham London Borough Council, its public sector show home, and the Office of Government Commerce, which acts as procurement sheriff for the whole UK public sector.* Becta said there could also be repercussions in disclosure for itself: “We have concluded that disclosure of any part of the MOU would prejudice the commercial interests of Becta and of schools throughout the UK because the significant savings achieved under the MOU would be put at risk,” it said. “We believe that our future negotiating position with Microsoft would be weakened and we would not be confident of our continuing ability to obtain the best deal possible for those UK schools that choose to purchase Microsoft products,” it added.
[...]
What business is it of UK tax payers how much a US corporation charges their schools anyway?
BECTA is virtually part of a group of agents of monopolisation, just like ACT and the BSA (both funded partly by Microsoft). While BECTA is not funded directly by Microsoft, there is clearly some strong relationship there. British taxpayers should be fuming. A similar story is being told in other countries whose educational bodies are abused in a similar fashion. The secrecy must end. It’s time for answers. █
I learned this morning via #ubuntu-us that they’re now selling Ubuntu at Best Buy, and couldn’t help myself: during my lunch break I swung out to Best Buy to drop $20 on a copy.
She soon returned home, and I quickly forgot that I had switched her. Today, I had reason to drop her an email so I took the opportunity to ask if she was still on Ubuntu and how she was liking it. Her response: “I am still using Ubuntu. I like it. I couldn’t play encoded DVDs at first. I was going to call you or talk to our computer guy at school, but decided to research the issue myself on the community help site. I got it figured out and upgraded to the newest version at the same time. It was really very simple to work through. I’m very happy with it and I absolutely hate going to windows machines now, they suck.”
Almost two weeks after leaking details about its new line of Ming PDA phones, Motorola made it official with a formal launch. Shipping now in China, the line includes a Linux-based Ming A1600 model offering GPS, handwriting recognition, and a 3.2-megapixel camera with business card reader.
OpenOffice 3.0 is a major milestone for the project, there are tons of other new features. I also noticed a great improvement in speed, which has always a bane in previous OpenOffice.org versions.
For GIMP 2.6, the developers had a strong focus: the implementation of GEGL should replace the old GIMP core. These changes are mainly invisible to the common user, but besides that many other very useful things have been done to help users in the future.
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