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How Articles About Novell Turn Into Promotion of Its Spouse, Microsoft

Sculpture



Summary: How Novell news becomes promotion of Microsoft; Journalist/columnist publishes a SUSE ramble that echoes myths and PR lies about Vista 7 (he talks about SUSE/Linux and instead turns it into a borderline advertisement for Microsoft)

FREE(DOM) software has mostly been an area where programmers have full control, as opposed to marketing people, managers, and lawyers for example. It helps keep interests such as the entertainment industry's out of the loop. In many ways, Free software is also an Apple- and Microsoft-free zone, but not where Novell is involved, with projects like Mono and Moonlight. More recently we found Novell staff advancing a Mono-based substitute to replace the GIMP [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. It's called Pinta and the press in the Philippines gives it some coverage this week, offering Pinta what seems like GIMP parity for some peculiar reasons. This is like a free advert for .NET, thanks to Novell.



As for Novell's future, this new report says that Novell still reviews its options after Elliott's bid, which means that Novell is still up for sale and Microsoft is a potential buyer. From the opening of this article from the Wall Street Journal:

Novell Inc. (NOVL) rejected an unsolicited takeover bid valued at about $2 billion, but the software company essentially put itself up for sale by saying it would consider alternatives to enhance shareholder value.


Paul Rubens ponders the value of SUSE (assuming it gets sold separately), but then he veers off his original course and starts promoting Vista 7, repeating common misconceptions about Vista 7 and confusing reality with Microsoft-generated hype that it hires agencies to spread. We ought to correct them very quickly.

First of all, Rubens echoes the myth of compatibility. We addressed it in the following posts:



While we are at it, another common misconception has to do with "security". We debunked this in posts such as:



How timely the news must be about Web advertising being used to infect Microsoft Windows. Elinor Mills sometimes characterises such things as a Windows-only problem, but not this time. It ought to be recognised that not all desktops run Windows. By perpetuating myths, CNET chooses to ignore reality and stick to a parallel ones of duality (where it's either "Mac" or "PC").

Ballmer's slide on Macs and GNU/Linux
Steve Ballmer's presentation slide
from 2009 shows GNU/Linux as bigger than Apple on the desktop



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