[Video] Novell and Microsoft 45 Years Later
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Novell and History
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THE company we all know or remember as "Novell" (now in the ashtray of history) started "possibly informally in 1979 in Provo", i.e. 45 years ago...
Long new stories about Novell's history bring back memories about a company that technically if not legally predates my birth. This one story focuses on the 80s and 90s. Does it cover the Microsoft problems correctly? It does not seem so, an associate has told us. Microsoft's aggressive whisper campaign had a lot to do with the demise of Netware. Some corrections needed there...
The way it seems (to me at least) on the surface, this long blog post, which was published earlier this week, mostly stops around SuSE and the "late Novell" (which more or less died in late 2010).
A pre-Microsoft Ars Technica wrote about the later (not original) case against Microsoft, the associate said. However, it would be important to find the earlier case, where Microsoft was "punished" by having to write letters to Novell's remaining customers. Microsoft-connected sites that the associate saw [1, 2] are still online, but "there must be a lot of Groklaw material, if one can find it," e.g. [1, 2, 3]. "The anti-Netware whisper campaign ran around the time of NT5 aka Windows 2k."
In the video above I mostly focus on the 90s (when I was a teenager) and what happened in 2006 when Novell's Ron Hovsepian (who had come from IBM) sealed the company's sad fate by taking the advice of Microsoft moles like Miguel de Icaza. Sadly we nowadays see Canonical and Red Hat following similar footsteps. We need to do something about that. █