Summary: SUSE is no longer investing in Mono, AttachMSFT might invest in the SCO trial, and SCO's Sandy Gupta works for Microsoft, harming Red Hat and selling Microsoft's proprietary software/malware for Linux

ATTACHMSFT has not been saying much about its plans. It drops some clues every now and then, but none of this amounts to contractual commitment. SUSE's managers mentioned they would support Mono, but the following article contradicts it somewhat. "New Suse director swears off Mono," is how our reader describes it, quoting:

Brauckmann confirms that SUSE is no longer investing in the project, but quickly added that SUSE would be supporting any commercial customers using Mono that have support contracts. "The rest of the SUSE roadmap stays intact," Brauckmann says. "No other products will be changed."

Groklaw is more active than ever, especially in the News Picks section where Pamela Jones is very omnipresent (and who can blame her? It is hard to let SCO and Microsoft just carry on their attacks without immediate rebuttals). She quotes from this article, concluding: "This is the first positive sign I've seen, in that Ralf Flaxa provided a declaration in support of IBM against SCO back in 2006."

She seems to believe that the SCO case will carry on and quoting this Desert News article, she notes that "David Bradford, if you recall, testified for Novell against SCO at the most recent jury trial." To quote:

Still, he said he has "high hopes" for the future of Novell in the wake of its acquisition by The Attachmate Group.

Techrights begs to differ. SUSE under AttachMSFT is basically in bad hands and users are sensing it:

The dust is settling in Attachmate’s purchase of Novell, with Attachmate officially announcing the leadership and organization of its new SUSE business unit on May 18. But despite management assurances, SUSE users remain concerned about the future care and feeding of their Linux distribution of choice.

Nils Brauckmann, the unit’s new president and general manager, pledged “to build a dedicated and focused SUSE business unit, strengthen the SUSE brand with the SUSE logo and get the SUSE message to customers, alliances and the media, and align resources.”

Novell's account uploads in YouTube are still for proprietary software [1, 2, 3], so this is probably where AttachMSFT is heading. SCO was the same after the Caldera days.

Speaking of the SCO case, Groklaw says that bankruptcy hearings are still being delayed, which probably serves SCO pretty well because Novell is in a state of turmoil/disarray at the moment , just like SCO. Is somebody buying time?

The bankruptcy court has cancelled the hearing scheduled for next Monday, May 23rd, and rescheduled any open matters from that hearing for June 17 at 2:30 p.m. The bankruptcy court has also issued a new Omnibus Hearing Order setting the dates for future hearings. In addition to the June 17th session, hearings are now scheduled for July 18, 2011 at 2:30 p.m., August 15, 2011 at 11:00 a.m., and September 12, 2011 at 10:30 a.m.

SCO and Microsoft would love to tax such things. They also try to tax CentOS using proprietary software addons, as we explained earlier in the week. The other day we showed a post from Microsoft about the subject, but what we did not notice was its author (link rel="nofollow"ed). "Sandy Gupta of SCO infamy, who tried to persuade the court that ELF is copyrighted by SCO and no one can use it without infringing SCO's rights, now invites people to run CentOS under Microsoft HypeV control. What a bad idea," put it our reader, who basically paraphrased Groklaw. The original wording from Jones: "OMG. Look who posted this. It's Sandy Gupta of SCO fame or infamy, depending on your point of view. Remember his code collage trying to persuade the court that ELF is copyrighted by SCO and no one can use it without infringing SCO's rights, and how Dr. Brian Kernighan called Gupta's copyright analysis "indefensible"? When he first went to Microsoft, Gupta was Director, Technical Competitive Strategy of the Server & Tools Division. Gupta's now General Manager of Marketing, Open Solutions Group, Microsoft. Frankly, that makes me start wondering if anything will ever really come of this CentOS announcement, or whether it's so much marketing." Gupta now received big paychecks from Microsoft ('pulling an O'Kelly', the usual way). ⬆

"[Microsoft's] Mr. Emerson and I discussed a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would 'backstop,' or guarantee in some way, BayStar's investment.... Microsoft assured me that it would in some way guarantee BayStar's investment in SCO."

--Larry Goldfarb, BayStar, key investor in SCO