Microsoft's little baby

Summary: A quick walk through the news shows that "cloud" hype -- not business freedom -- is what Novell still offers to prospective customers

THE NOVELL of 2008-2010 was not the same as the older Novell, which still marketed "Open Source" rather than "Cloud Computing".

Somewhere along the line Novell decided to de-emphasise its original selling point. This let Red Hat claim the higher moral ground, not just because it was not paying Microsoft for GNU/Linux. In this month's news we are reminded of SUSE's history: "The past few years have seen many open source companies being bought by proprietary ones. Back in 2003, Novell bought German Linux maker SuSE. A few years ago, Sun Microsystems bought database maker MySQL in a landmark $1 billion deal, and then last year, Sun Microsystems was itself snapped up by Oracle. One of the more recent deals is VMWare's acquisition of Zimbra."

Over time Novell made SUSE more and more proprietary, to the point where it is marketed as "cloud" OS, its source code is hard to obtain, and there is a shady patent deal elevating its cost.

Novelldemo has just uploaded about 10 more videos like this one video about a dead product, Vibe. Why bother? Maybe a marketing leftover. Either way, this too is an example of proprietary software from Novell, based on open source from another company (Google). It got marketed as "cloud" and failed to gain traction. Attachmate pulled the plug.

Another new article from the same source says: ""We built the platform ourselves, but adopted the Novell cloud manager. Business people provision resources on the fly," says Richard Vester, head of hosted services at Vodacom Business."

"Another similar product from Novell is just the repackaging of Red Hat's product."Cloud manager, eh? Be sure to check where it came from [1, 2]. Another similar product from Novell is just the repackaging of Red Hat's product.

An additional new article states: "However the technology is used, shopping in a few years may not look much like shopping today.

"“We hope so,” said Wilson, who worked for IT firm Novell for 21 years. “We’re counting on it.”"

To be fair, the decisions at Novell came from managers consulted by marketing people, it is not the developers down the food chain who should be blamed. Developers often prefer to share their code, making it a source of pride, too.

Another article quotes Randy Hugie (program manager, certification and skills assessment at Novell) as saying: “Using the cloud, we implemented a 14-week, wide-scale partner academy.”

More cloud hype then. This other article which mentioned PlateSpin still plays along with those ideas. Novell bought some "cloud" stuff rather than vendors of Free/Open Source software. All that is left from Novell is legal mess, as we shall show later. ⬆