Summary: Novell's promotional action in IDG gets even more incestuous; MySQL and Sun's other assets revisited in relation to Novell

FOR quite some time now, Novell has produced promotional audio series, the latest example of which is this one and another one from The Register, which sells out these days.

Several days ago we showed that IDG gave Novell a podium from which Novell employees Zonker and Greg K-H promoted SUSE. Zonker now uses his place there to promote Mono by speaking to another colleague from Novell. Novell's PR team is happy about this.

In this latest OpenMic podcast, Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier talks with Mono founder, Miguel de Icaza, about what’s new with the Mono Project and what’s coming soon. The two also discuss the many iPhone apps brought to you by Mono, what’s next for Moonlight (the Linux implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight), and why Windows developers should really check out Mono.

Here is the direct link with the list of shows so far. That's 2 shows out of 2 (100%) with just Novell employees in them. Amazing, isn't it? It is stuff like that which helps Mono gain acceptance in some recognised circles and Unity has just earned some funds:

Unity Technologies Raises $5.5 Million From Sequoia Capital

[...]

Here’s how CEO David Helgason describes some of the platform’s benefits:

Unity uses .NET (or rather Mono, Novell’s open source .NET implementation) for “scripting”, which sidesteps the whole classical conundrum of scripting-versus-native, since the code gets JIT or AOT compiled to native code while still being sandboxable and easy. Also, there’s lots of documentation and very rich libraries to work with.

Mono also receives a lot of positive publicity from Microsoft Web sites, for obvious reasons.

The other day we showed Zonker's objection to the FSF's position and right now we find him repeating the arguments of a known Stallman basher, Matt Asay. They both make the same argument, using the MySQL situation to discredit Stallman.

In the news we find an hypothetical scenario where Novell is mentioned as a potential suitor for MySQL

If Ellison changed his mind and decided to sell MySQL, open source companies like Red Hat and Novell would be on top of the list of potential buyers, according to Bo Lykkegaard, software analyst at IDC.

More on Sun, Oracle, and Novell in relation to identity management:

Enterprises need confidence in the stability and continuity of their supplier when large investments are involved. Confidence in the identity management sector was badly shaken when HP, one of the leading providers, announced that it was leaving the sector in 2008. The fact that Novell took over its products only partially assuaged enterprises' fears.

To summarise, Novell promotes Mono by sending out there media boosters like Zonker and there may be real danger here that Novell covets MySQL, not just OpenOffice.org, which it forked [1, 2, 3, 4] (Sun hates that). ⬆