Summary: New evidence confirms that Novell is still advancing interests that are seemingly conflicting to its own

THE NOVELL-MICROSOFT alliance is still being promoted by Windows Web sites. What's not to like about it? It's extremely valuable to Microsoft, which in the case of this new article continues to use Novell as a ramp into HPC.

As we have shown earlier this year, Novell does a fair deal of Vista 7 promotion, e.g. [1, 2, 3]. The latest example -- like many prior ones -- comes from Grant Ho. The headline is: "Seven ways application virtualization can simplify any Windows7 migration" (the promotion of Vista 7 is never very direct).

Here is Novell making a Windows installer for Evolution and Jeffrey Stedfast, one of the Mono programmers, is "reflecting on 10 Years at Ximian," to use his own words. They mostly imitate Microsoft and Evolution is an Outlook clone.

Today marks my 10th anniversary since I was hired at Helix Code to work on Evolution.

As we emphasised last week, MeeGo is having a Mono problem [1, 2, 3, 4] and Novell employees are in the midst of it. It's not the fault of Intel or Nokia. To quote some news:

Novell (NASDAQGS: NOVL) announced recently it will release SUSE® MeeGo as a fully supported operating system for netbooks. Novell expects SUSE MeeGo to be pre-installed on a variety of devices from Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in the next twelve months.

And also in the news:

Novell is developing an OpenSuse version of MeeGo that should be available on netbooks within the next year.

At least there will be a non-SUSE version of MeeGo (if all goes according to plan). There is a bit of a problem when OEMs preload SUSE, which is taxed by Microsoft for some unknown reasons only Novell can ever explain. From the news:

Engadget’s Joanna Stern spotted an HP Classmate PC netbook running SUSE Linux 11 at Novell’s Computex booth this week.

And shortly afterwards:

Engadget took a stroll around the Novell booth and was surprised to see an HP Mini among the electronics on display.

Shouldn't HP use something like WebOS, as it already does with Slate for example?

Anyway, the Windows promotion from Novell goes further and it expands to Visual Studio (a proprietary Windows application). "First Beta of MonoTools 2 for VisualStudio" is the latest post from Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza and the Mono Web site has another announcement to make:

Mono Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 Beta 1

We are extremely happy to announce Mono Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 Beta 1! (MonoTools)

Mono Tools for Visual Studio is a commercial add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 that enables developers to build, debug, and deploy .NET applications targeting Mono without leaving Visual Studio.

Wonderful!

Novell used to be all about Novell and about its own operating systems. That is gradually changing as more Microsoft employees are hired by Novell while OpenSUSE developers suffer from new layoffs or willful departures (this latest example doesn't say what happened). ⬆