Summary: The latest Novell software news with some commentary about the nature of this software

NOVELL has many partners in the proprietary software world (Novell eDirectory support, GroupWise, etc.), not just in networking. Novell itself is a predominantly proprietary software company, but it builds a GNU/Linux distribution thanks in part to many competitors who work along with it to produce free/libre computer code. Novell's contribution to Linux has dropped sharply over the years (as judged by Linux patches, not work on Microsoft projects like Mono and Moonlight).

A new analysis of Novell is out and also this press release about a new appliance based on the award-winning SUSE Studio. It uses Sentinel, which is proprietary.

Built using SUSE Studio, Novell’s web-based appliance building solution, Sentinel Log Manager helps customers significantly reduce deployment cost and installation complexity in today’s highly distributed and virtualized IT environments.

When Novell strikes new deals/contracts it is likely that Novell merely spreads proprietary software which is put on top of GNU/Linux, for which Microsoft is paid too. As we find in this new example, Novell continues losing to Microsoft, which merely replaces proprietary with proprietary.

12. Approved a request from the IT Department for a Microsoft Software Upgrade which includes migrating from Novell to MS Office 2010 and migrating from GroupWise to Outlook at a total cost of $180,000.00 with funding for the request as follows...

Also in the news:

Cavalluzzo's environment was particularly unique, featuring a combination of Novell servers, GroupWise e-mail and Corel WordPerfect documents. A perfect fit for these parameters, Worldox allows for firm-wide sharing, searching and management of documents, e-mails and scanned images.

Again, it ought to be clear that Novell's main part of the stack which used to be free is SUSE; but SUSE is not free anymore (Novell pays Microsoft for it) and deployed on top of it is proprietary software from Novell. That's the difference between Novell and Red Hat for example. Buying from Novell is helping proprietary software. ⬆