Bonum Certa Men Certa

More on Novell's Mixed-Source Model

Recently, it was declared that Novell is a mixed-source company, which really shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone familiar with their current product line. The fact that Novell seems to be retreating from their march towards an open-source stack is disappointing, however.

At the CITI forum, Novell South Africa Country Manager Stafford Masie shared his insight in contrasting the philosophies of Red Hat and Novell, or as he put it, "end to end open source" versus a "hybrid stack":

We believe today alot of the open source technology has not caught up yet to enterprise customers’ needs in the security domain, management domain. Where Linux is open source, specifically Linux is completely applicable is the platform, the desktop, office productivity suite, the database, etc so there’s kinda 5 major areas where its good enough if not better than whats out there, ok? where its not there yet, Novell has proprietary technology and partners that provide 3rd party technologies to that proprietary technologies where we wrap our technologies around this Linux technology. so, like zenworks management, our zenworks management suite is a proprietary piece of technology.

During the question and answer session at the CITI forum, Masie also spoke regarding the differing "streams" of open source that Novell has as well, differentiating between Novell's OSS and FOSS product lines, in his mind. Masie also goes to great lengths to enumerate the additional proprietary features and improvements in Novell's version of OpenOffice.org:

but yeah- that interoperability is absolutely crucial, and one of the things that we do get slapped over the wrist with continuously is that... its the OSS debate vs the FOSS debate... Y'know, we've got two streams of our technology as Novell, we've got the FOSS stream and then we've got the OSS stream.

OpenSUSE is really the FOSS stream, we've got derivatives of every one of our Linux technologies that you can download for free, gain the source code to, participate in the community, etc but then we do certain things with those derivatives and that innovation that locks it down, makes it more interoperable, that goes through testing, quality assurance, regression testing, backwards compatibility, all that 'stuff' with the hardware partners and then we split out a version of it that is 'enterprise ready',

Now what we mean by enterprise ready is the following: that its backwards compatible so you can deploy it in a hybrid environment so different versions will work with each other, its going to work well with other operating systems, so theres some interoperability, its going to work well on that hardware, but most importantly we put things in that distribution that you as enterprise customers want.

You know what we do, we license fonts. Y'know, you can go to... there's several font sites, I could actually go to the sites now, where you license fonts, those true-type fonts, etc. you need to license those fonts because Microsoft does the exact same thing with Office, we license that into OpenOffice - our distribution of it, our derivative of it. So, that's something proprietary.

Graphic rendering engines, there are certain ways things get rendered in Powerpoint documents, we take some of those graphic rendering engines and embed it into ours, because if a little animation does something silly in Powerpoint, we want it.to do that something silly in OpenOffice in exactly the same way.

Then there's third party tools like Adobe- Adobe Reader, Real Player, Macromedia's media little player, those things are proprietary, but you want them in your distribution, why? because when that user wants to open that Powerpoint file, play that animation, click on the link let the realplayer file play, go to a website and watch that flash show properly... you want all of those little pieces in there.

Now, for some customers that feel that's not important, well y'know, we've got the OpenSUSE derivatives of it, but that's what we do with Linux. We don't just embed things, we do add things that we believe give it more robustness but it doesnt infringe on the GPL, doesn't infringe on any patents, etc So yeah, I think the interoperability issue from that perspective is key for enterprise customers.

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

Throwing Money at Lawyers Can't Stop Us (It Never Did)
Even just trying to censor things can result in the opposite of the desired outcome
BetaNews Has More or Less Died After Experiments With LLM Slop, Is Linuxsecurity Next?
It doesn't seem like BetaNews knows what it's doing, let alone what it talks about
Links 13/06/2025: Journalists Targeted by Cracking, China-Japan and Israel-Iran Tensions Grow
Links for the day
 
Site/Datacentre Maintenance Next Week
speed things up
Bulgaria: GNU/Linux Near 10%
The Bulgarian market seems to be changing
I Never Spoke to BetaNews. But BetaNews Wants to Ensure I Never Will, Either.
Sometimes just the reluctance to talk about it can say a great deal
Online Search or Large Search Engines Aren't Working Anymore
business models that directly compete with interests of Web users
Holidays and Breaks
I've hardly taken any long breaks since I got married
Danish OpenDocument Freedom
"year of Linux"
When Abusive Law Firms (Working for Microsofters Against Us) Assert That Someone Writing in Social Media About Himself is Confidential Information
There was no reason to throw "GDPR" into 2 SLAPPs; they know it, but the goal was to increase the cost of a Defence and lessen the incentive to challenge the SLAPPs
Links 14/06/2025: Wars and L.A. Distortion Effect
Links for the day
Gemini Links 14/06/2025: Historic Ada Design and GeminiSpace.Club to Expire
Links for the day
Links 14/06/2025: India Plane Crash and Middle-Eastern War
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 13, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, June 13, 2025
Gemini Links 13/06/2025: (Not)virtues and Project Yeet Broadband
Links for the day
Links 13/06/2025: US Reduces Nonessential Staff at Baghdad Embassy Ahead of Strikes in Iran, Invasion of California Debated
Links for the day
X11 is Free Software
Whether you agree (e.g. on politics) with the person/s forking it doesn't matter
The More Time Passes, the Better Our Advice on Social Control Media Seems
At the end of the day, any platform you do not control yourself is working for someone else
Twitter (X) is Dying, Now It's Just Like a Mafia-Type Operation of the Man Who Does Nazi Salutes in Public
a form of extortion
UK High Court Blasts Brett Wilson LLP for Misusing "GDPR" After Failed Efforts to Censor Critics Using 'Libel' Claims
No wonder this firm is rapidly shrinking
Recent Blunders in Microsoft GitHub (e.g. Slop-Generated Bug Reports or GPL Violations 'as a Service') Taking Their Toll?
Put bluntly, if you still use Microsoft GitHub, then you're slave to Microsoft
American Imperialism and Microsoft Plagiarism
Techrights will therefore do what Microsoft does not want it to do: it'll write even more about Microsoft
When They Have Nothing Left to Help Advance Abusive Litigation for Microsoft People... Other Than Throwing ~500 Pages of Someone Else's Work Into a PDF
Microsoft is having a very tough year
The Price of Exposing Corruption in Poland (and Elsewhere)
It's easier to participate in corruption than to merely do the right thing and oppose it
Slopwatch and Yet More Holes in 'Secure Boot' (as Usual!), Promoted Inside Linux by the Man We Are Suing
Today's Slopwatch will be short
Gemini Links 13/06/2025: People You've Left Behind, Life Update and OS Changes
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 12, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, June 12, 2025
Links 12/06/2025: Portland Homeless Deaths Quadruple, COVID Cases Surge in Asia
Links for the day
Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part IX: Minimum Wages For You (Experienced Scientist), Alicante/EU Paydays For Me (Unproductive, Corrupt Official)
Does UPRP maladministration extend to the false belief that qualified and experienced scientists can play the role of circus clowns?
"The Liberating Power of Simply Telling People the Truth."
'polite' bullying
Who Imitates Who? Plagiarist as Client (From Microsoft), 'Plagiarism' at the Law Firm?
let's revisit the subject
EPO's Gareth Lord Asked About "Quality and Productivity" or, Put Another Way, Why the EPO Keeps Granting So Many Invalid/Illegal Patents
letter to Lord
EPO's Central Staff Committee (CSC) Scrutinises the Man Who Illegally Grants (and Forces Others to Illegally Participate in Granting) Software Patents in Europe
EPO compels examiners to break the law in the name of obeying illegal "rules" or "orders"
The Latest Rumour Says The Next (as Correctly Predicted Before) Wave of Layoffs at Microsoft is 3 Weeks Away, "Larger Than the First Wave"
Step 2
TV Licensing Used to SPAM Your Postbox, Now It Does the Same to E-mail
First they ask for your E-mail address; then they start nagging you via E-mail
The Toxic Playbook
Either you support Prince Mohammed bin Salman or you're a nazi
It's Possible That BetaNews Got Cracked, But Nobody Talks About It, The Site Contains an Outdated Old Image, No Activity
It's possible that they will never explain what happened to the site and users' accounts
Links 12/06/2025: Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson Dies
Links for the day
Gemini Links 12/06/2025: Video Game Diegesis and Steam Next Fest
Links for the day
Why the Militants Have Lost Every Battle Since 2022 (When Attacking My Wife and I in Various Ways, Even Attacking Our Employers)
This takes patience, sure, but at the end most evildoers face the consequences for their actions
Our Priority is Still Tackling Software Patents and Corruption in Patent Offices
Meanwhile we got compliments on our recent articles, which means that they are effective
Politics Will Impact Software Choices
Will those systems respect users' freedom?
EPO: Neglecting Children to Promote American Monopolies by Shielding Them From European Competition
Yesterday the Central Staff Committee at the EPO spoke about another "reform" at the Office
Slopwatch: Another Day, Another Slopfest, LLM Slop Scrapers Slow Down Our Site
We too have some slop issues; this past day this site and the sister site had to answer about 2.5 million requests (not counting Gemini Protocol) and it's slowing things down for everybody
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, June 11, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, June 11, 2025