Not to be left out of the coverage of the recent virtualization collaboration announcements, which seem to be all the rage these days, Novell and VMware have announced an agreement which will allow for independent software vendors to create fully supported custom virtual appliances built with Suse Linux Enterprise.

Novell also announced today a broad collaboration agreement with VMware to deliver SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) as a fully-supported and optimised guest operating system running on VMware ESX, the industry-leading hypervisor. The two companies have signed a cooperative support agreement that enables Novell to provide enhanced support for customers running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a guest on VMware ESX. In addition to Novell’s customary virtualisation-friendly subscription model, Novell is offering a limited time pricing promotion that gives an additional financial incentive to customers seeking to benefit from the companies’ collaboration.

Ala RedHat⁄Microsoft, there wasn’t any mention of any monetary or patent exchanges, nor was there any mention if Novell had to say they were sorry for trying to team up with Microsoft to "come after" VMware in an "open source way" a few years ago:

[emphasis mine]
Web services, that’s the proprietary aspects, making active directory and eDirectory work together- enterprise customers want to see that, virtualization is very very key, customers want to utilize Linux as either a host operating system with Microsoft as a guest operating system, or vice versa, and yes wea re going to support the XEN technology there, the XEN hypervisor technology, Microsoft is going to support it too. Yes, there is a competitive angle there, yes we’re coming at VMware yes yes yes we are, ok thats part of it because but we’re doing it in an open source way, so were going to support the XEN technologies in our server platforms and togther collaborate and ensure it works properly, supported properly, etc
Now as far as thats concerned, thats the technology aspects of it, now its broad from a Linux perspective, they’re essentially saying that anyone who is an OpenSUSE contributor is covered under the covenant. the covenant essentially is a patent agreement between Novell and Microsoft that says if you participate in the OpenSUSE distribution… as long as its not for commercial gain, that you are covered by this covenant, that they will not exercise what they believe is their patent rights…

We’re at the point of perhaps needing dedicated hosting, so maybe we’ll need suggestions for that as well, since my host company is getting tired of melted machines.

Too many http connections
————–
One of your resold accounts (boycottnovell.com) was causing a considerable load on the server which your reseller account is hosted on. When I investigated this issue further, I discovered that this account is averaging more than 180,000 hits per day, with spikes as high as 700,000 hits per day. This is far too much traffic for a shared hosting environment.

I still believe that we can do this with proper caching and design, and I’m sure that it’s a problem that’s been solved before. Any suggestions?

Recognizing the woeful economic state of the U.A.S.S*, the good folks from Raleigh, North Carolina have decided that they should forego their annual holiday festivities and rather donate the funds to provide 800,000 meals to the needy.

The cash donation isn’t all. Red Hat workers are also running canned food drives. Raleigh executives are throwing their weight behind the drives by offering to donate cash for every 500 cans donated. In Dallas, workers are running a coat drive.

Sometimes I am overly cynical of events such as these and believe that corporations use them to garner positive coverage and publicity. If so, it worked like a charm on me this time.

Nice job either way, Red Hat.

* Union of American Socialist States, comrades.

Google has announced that it will be canceling its proposed advertising arrangement with Yahoo!, due to a desire to avoid a protracted inquiry process by antitrust regulators.

“Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners,” Google’s chief counsel, David Drummond, wrote in the statement. “That wouldn’t have been in the long-term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement.”
In a response, Yahoo (YHOO 13.93, +0.58, +4.3%) said it was disappointed by the move, which came after regulators signaled their opposition to the arrangement.
“Yahoo continues to believe in the benefits of the agreement and is disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend it in court,” the company’s statement read.

Does this failure signal the end of get-the-facts style marketing as we know it?

Folks here in America have likely been hearing all too much about "Joe the plumber" for the last few days – by some counts nearly two dozen times in last night’s presidential debate alone, which occurred about a half hour drive from here, featuring a few Long Island style left turns, at Hofstra University.

Well, Microsoft is never shy about mimicking something that seems to work, and has decided to feature their own "ordinary Joe" developer, Larry Osterman, to provide some ground-level perspective into the Windows 6 – I mean 7 – development process that is ongoing, or perhaps complete since he refers to the process in the past tense a time or two, as noted by the Register.

Microsoft has of course not said when Windows 7 will ship, but there’s a widespread belief Windows 7 will arrive next year.

According to Osterman, it’s the Windows 7 feature teams are calling the shots on cutting features with management “standing behind them.” “In Vista it would have been much harder to convince senior management to abandon features,” Osterman reckoned.

“One of the messages that management has consistently driven home to the teams is ‘cutting is shipping’, and they’re right. If a feature isn’t coming together, it’s usually far better to decide NOT to deliver a particular feature then to have that feature jeopardize the ability to ship the whole system,” he said.

…

Astute readers will have noticed Osterman is using the past tense when talking about Windows 7. This suggests engineering has been completed. The reality, though, is Windows 7 is far from finished and Microsoft has been working on internal builds.

*blink*, *blink* So, the process for dropping planned features is now easier than it was during Vista development? I mean, did I read that right? Arguably, the perception that Windows Vista suffered a "death by a thousand cuts" is one of the most persistently negative impressions that is held by many techies regarding Vista (although, some folks would disagree).

Other than Multitouch and baked-in virtualization, what planned features of Windows 7 are even compelling enough to notice if they were dropped? Of course, should one of those two features not make the cut, it would likely be equivalent to the loss of WinFS for Vista – embarrassing, if not catastrophic.

As Moore’s law keeps on trucking and hardware continually gets faster and more affordable simultaneously, Vista will lose the stigma of sluggishness and bloat that has plagued it amongst consumers since its first introduction, and forced Microsoft to embark on the Mojave and Seinfeld expeditions.

However, the lack of excitement amongst the technical user base is something that continues to plague Vista, and from the sound of things it doesn’t appear to me that Microsoft has learned anything in that regard from their Vista development process, save integrating the testing team into the development process from the get-go, a staggeringly ’90s realization.

To borrow another overused term in this year’s presidential race here in the ‘States, it seems like Windows 7 is an instance of Microsoft trying to put "lipstick on a pig", if perhaps a slightly more svelte one that may help steer consumers to their Windows Live services, they must surely hope.

Well, the Windows Vista-Capable class action lawsuit has taken another pretty interesting turn, with the plaintiffs lawyers having requested that Microsoft use it’s own Windows Update service to notify potential class members of the suit.

The Vista Capable lawsuit accuses Microsoft of duping buyers in 2006 and 2007 by letting PC makers slap a “Vista Capable” sticker on PCs when it allegedly knew that many of those systems would only be able to run Vista Home Basic, the entry-level version. The case, which began in 2007 and was granted class-action status in February 2008, claims that Home Basic is not representative of the Vista that Microsoft marketed to consumers.

Earlier this month, the plaintiffs in the Vista Capable case asked U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman to make Microsoft use the update service to send all Windows users a notice of the class-action lawsuit. The notice, which would pop-up on users’ screens, would include a link to a site where consumers could obtain more information.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft is not too keen on this idea, and says that it would not be possible for them to properly identify which Vista machines are qualified to be considered class members, and force them to essentially spam millions of uninvolved PC owners. Microsoft also decries the potential confusion and outrage that such a repurposing of the Windows Update features could cause – with the possibilities of users disabling automatic updates in revolt, or flooding the Microsoft help desk with questions or complaints.

Now, I find it hard to believe that Windows Update is incapable of identifying, with a fairly good level of granularity, potential class member PCs by identifying the operating system version and chipset – otherwise how does the system identify which patches are apropos to your system? Even if, using these criteria, some unrelated Vista PCs are incorrectly identified, I don’t think it would be the 120 million that they have claimed. Can anyone imagine, if the system were so obtuse, the havoc that would be wrought by a mis-applied update intended for Vista Premium with a particular Nvidia video card but was instead applied to all systems running Vista, regardless of version and hardware?

But, perhaps surprisingly, I agree with Microsoft that the Windows Update service should not be compelled to be used outside of its scope – if it is true that Microsoft has not in the past used this service for any informational or promotional purpose (I don’t use Windows so I don’t know). If the sole purpose of Windows Update is to provide patches and security updates, it should not be within the purview of the plaintiffs to change this arrangement between Microsoft and their customers – even the ones who could be potential litigants, in my opinion.

Security updates, and customer relationships in general, require a certain amount of trust – any actions by Microsoft outside of their espoused purpose for the Windows Update service will indeed negatively impact their perception amongst customers and might even cause the feared backlash of users disabling the service out of concerns that Microsoft could once again make changes to their terms of service at a later date and begin targeting PC owners with self-serving "informational" and advertising notifications.

Anyway, this is just my two cents and all I usually am offered is a penny for my thoughts – perhaps that’s why I am so quiet usually, every time I open my mouth I lose money…

In a recent interview, Joe Biden, the U.S. Vice-Presidential candidate for the Democrats equated paying more taxes with patriotism, saying that it was time for wealthier Americans to "jump in" and "help get America out of the rut".

Well, I’m glad to say there may be hope for the good ol’ U.S. of A., since it seems that many Apple customers are just the sort of patriots that Mr. Biden was looking for. According to a recent interview with Microsoft’s Brad Brooks over on the "Beyond Binary" blog – Apple customers are repeatedly, and willingly it seems as their market share grows, being "taxed" when they choose a Mac.

There really is a tax around there for people that are evaluating their choices going into this holiday season and going forward. There’s a choice tax that we talked about, which is, hey, you want to buy a machine that’s other than black, white, or silver, and if you want to get it in multiple different configurations or price points, you’re going to be paying a tax if you go the Apple way.

There’s going to be an application tax, which is if you want choice around applications, or if you want the same type of application experience on your Mac versus Windows, you’re going to be purchasing a lot of software. And even at that you’re not going to get the same experience. You’re not going to get things like Microsoft Outlook, you’re not going to get the games that you’re used to playing. There’s a technology tax–Apple still doesn’t have HDMI, doesn’t have Blu-ray offerings, doesn’t have e-SATA external disk drives that work at twice the speed of FireWire. And so you’ve got all of these things that are truly taxes.

You’ve also got an upgrade tax. The only machine, as far as I know, within the Apple lineup that’s actually upgradeable is the Mac Pro, the $2,800 version, which is (more expensive than) just about any PC configuration that you get from any one of our manufacturers.

The part I found interesting was when Mr. Brooks pointed out that products such as Outlook, Visio and Project are all unavailable on the Mac, as well as characterizing Mac Office as "stripped down". I mean, these are Microsoft products – no?

The only reason that these features and applications are unavailable on the Mac is because Microsoft doesn’t offer them – intentionally, it would seem – in order to prevent or at least slow a mass exodus from their platform by keeping competing platform versions lagging technologically. Unfortunately, this behavior is nothing new for our friends from Redmond, just I can’t recall them ever being so blunt about it.

Interoperability the Microsoft way: one-way, that is.

I’ll admit, I found the fact that Bill Gates was using his rather famous (in Geek culture, anyhow) mug shot in the first of those ill-fated Seinfeld ads for Microsoft to be uproarious – even if the commercials were so-so. The fact that he’d embrace the image that has so often been used to poke a bit of fun at him, I found that to be pretty humorous and ‘big’ of him and Microsoft.

More humorous, to me, was the revelation that Microsoft’s latest set of advertisements for Windows would be mimicking the popular “I’m a Mac” campaign from Apple and using the slogan “Life Without Walls” after all of those sayings that were so popular some years ago. Of course, these ads are just awful – to the point where I want those Seinfeld ads to continue.

Well, there may be another aspect to this other than Microsoft showing it’s sense of humor, and that is trying to possibly undermine the supposed pending trademark of a competing Operating System company, G.ho.st.

An unusual Israeli-Palestinian joint venture start-up, which makes a cloud-based Web operating system letting users access their desktops from any computer with an Internet connection, is alleging a trademark violation by Microsoft in its new $300 million advertising campaign.

G.ho.st, which stands for “Global Hosted Operating System,” is claiming it has a pending trademark registration for the tagline “no walls.”

For it’s part, Microsoft claims that they are aware of no such trademarks, and dismiss the claim as “without merit”. Of course, we all know that Microsoft has a dubious history with trademark suits involving competitors, ala Lindows/Linspire, so it’ll be interesting to see how far they take this one before either backing down or making a large payment.

This arrangement is not a merger, nor a joint venture. It is much simpler than that – it is a non-exclusive agreement to supply advertising. Yahoo! remains free to enter into similar agreements with other advertising providers, including Microsoft. In addition, Yahoo! will maintain relationships with its own advertising customers and will continue to rely exclusively on its own advertising program outside of the U.S. and Canada.

The agreement has a term of up to ten years: a 4-year initial term and two 3-year renewals at Yahoo!’s option.

As noted by Shaun Nichols at vnunet.com, Google also takes the time to specifically take Microsoft to task for what they characterize as “political attacks” incited by Microsoft’s failure to acquire Yahoo! earlier this year.

The Google website also notes that, although they do not believe regulatory blessing is required, Yahoo! and Google are delaying implementation of the deal to allow for the U.S. Department of Justice, and possibly States’ Attorney Generals, to review the deal and have their concerns about the effect on competition assuaged.

It just seems humorous to me that Google is hitting back at Microsoft using their own methods and tactics. Well, except for the chair throwing anyhow.

According to published reports, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotell has ruled that Microsoft is still behind in fulfilling its obligations to the court in regard to documenting their APIs and protocols, some of which are nearly five years overdue now.

In the wake of antitrust actions, documentation of Microsoft technologies has become a method of allaying the concerns of legal authorities in both the US and EU. By providing documentation of the APIs and protocols used by its products, Microsoft would not only allow third-party and open-source software to interact better with Windows and other software, but potentially enable them to write replacements, in whole or in part, for Microsoft products. This, in theory, would enable more software companies to compete on equal terms with Redmond.

Unfortunately, the company has consistently had trouble with producing complete and useful documentation. As noted above, the company struggled to satisfy EU authorities that it was complying with the agreement—that was 2006. By 2008, documentation was rearing its ugly head in the US court system. Microsoft’s consent decree with the federal and state attorneys general was set to expire, and most of the conditions were allowed to. But Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who is overseeing the consent decree, ruled that Microsoft still hadn’t sufficiently documented some protocols, despite those documents having been due in 2003. As a result, the consent decree will remain in place at least until November of 2009.

"At least until November 2009", because as Judge Kollar-Kotelly also said that she is inclined to not lift the consent degree at that time unless Microsoft has brought themselves into compliance. It’s somewhat baffling that Microsoft is unable or unwilling to fulfill these requirements, but I also must admit that I have some questions regarding what these “overview” and “system” documents are supposed to be, exactly.

Meanwhile, at least some folks who are involved in the process are becoming a bit frustrated, questioning Microsoft’s commitment to the process and whether they even understand the gravity of the situation.

“I have to express my concern with this attitude that they’re behaving as a volunteer,” said Jay Himes, the antitrust bureau chief for the New York attorney general’s office. “It fosters this sort of grudging commitment to get the system documents done.”

He said the technical committee’s implementation group has been called off all other tasks to support the template effort, and the committee dedicated more than 150 hours to meetings about the templates just last week.

“What we have today is the (technical committee) and its staff spoon-feeding the world’s biggest PC company,” he said. “Something about that just isn’t right.”

Representatives for Microsoft said the company is very committed to finishing the templates and the system documents. The company has assigned a significant number of senior engineers on the template project, said Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s senior vice president of servers and tools.

“We understand that is a requirement,” said Charles Rule, an attorney for Microsoft. “The delays have not been as a result of Microsoft taking a lackadaisical attitude,”

Still, Kollar-Kotelly questioned Microsoft’s commitment.

“I do appreciate that these things are complex, but I think it’s interesting the (technical committee) is able to do what’s necessary and bring Microsoft along, and not the other way around,” she said.

So, according to these legal folks, they are saying that there’s a group outside of Redmond which is able to understand and implement their own APIs and protocols, even with non-existent or poorly created documentation? Sorry, I just don’t believe it. And I certainly can’t believe that Microsoft would do anything to willingly distort and⁄or delay the legal process.

I think I need to add a Sarcasm category to supplement our humor one… but, seriously, why is Microsoft still unable or unwilling to comply with what seems to be the final hurdle in this saga? I mean, this has to be a lot easier than being broken up into two seperate companies, no?

Curiously, according to the Associated Press article, it appears that Microsoft willingly stepped in to this conflict as a defendant after Lucent Technologies filed suit against PC manufacturers Dell and Gateway.

In February 2007, a jury in U.S. District Court in San Diego determined Microsoft infringed on two patents that cover the encoding and decoding of audio into the digital MP3 format, a popular way to convert music from CDs into files on computers and vice versa.

Six months later, the judge who presided over the case, Rudi M. Brewster, vacated the ruling, saying Microsoft’s Windows Media Player software does not infringe on one of the two patents in question.

Brewster, siding with Microsoft, also said the second patent is jointly owned by both Alcatel-Lucent and Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, a German company that Microsoft paid $16 million in exchange for use of the technology. Since Fraunhofer did not sue Microsoft, the Redmond, Wash.-based software maker was in the clear.

…

The MP3 patent claims were just two of 15 made by Lucent Technologies Inc. in 2003 against PC makers Gateway Inc. and Dell Inc. for technology developed by Bell Labs, Lucent’s research arm.

Later that year, Microsoft added itself to the list of defendants, saying the patents were closely tied to its Windows operating system. France’s Alcatel bought Lucent in 2006.

So, Microsoft are the (sorta) good guys here? I’m at a loss for words, but good for them I guess.

I find it a bit funny that they didn’t try to argue that software is not a component, and that there needs to be a device for a patent, like they had previously.

Once upon a time, I somewhat jokingly had speculated about Microsoft trying to “pull a Goo-Tube” and step in with their deep pockets when they saw decent technologies were about to be assailed with spurious patent claims – maybe it was more true than I ever thought?

Probably not likely, but what do you think? Tellme.

It appears that Novell’s ZENworks is gaining some Network Access Control (NAC) functionality, a product of their Senforce acquisition. As Sean Michael Kerner points out over at Enterprise Networking Planet, there is some confusion about Novell’s NAC implementation as it relates to Linux. Specifically, at this point, Novell is not supporting Linux endpoints – not SUSE, no one.

Apparently, it was a ‘business decision’ to go forward with a mainly Windows-compatible feature set, despite the fact that the NAC is actually running on a Linux kernel, albeit a customized non-SUSE one. I guess that Novell doesn’t see much of a Linux market out there, which is weird because it appears that Red Hat does.

The surprises don’t end there. Although ZENworks NAC is built on top of a Linux kernel, it does not actually support the OS as an enforcement endpoint. Ferre explained that Linux support wasn’t a priority because Novell sees a higher demand for Windows-compatible solutions, owing to the density of Windows devices in the enterprise.

“It was a decision on coming to market,” Ferre said. “We needed to either deliver on what is in the most demand and get to market sooner, or we could have held off and release at a later date. Based on where the market is today, we wanted to move forward immediately rather than wait for Linux compatibility.”

Still, he added that Linux support may be in the works.

“We are offering testing capability on Windows and Mac OS X,” Ferre said. “Linux is a logical extension since we have SUSE Linux, and it is something we will be looking at in the near term.”

In addition, the article notes that the ZENworks NAC does not – again “at this point” – support the Trusted Network Content (TNC) standard, something that even Microsoft is apparently doing with their own Network Access Protection (NAP). (Is it really necessary for them to use a seperate, nearly identical, acronym for their offering – what’s wrong with “NAC” Microsoft? Do we need more acronyms for the same thing?) This lack of TNC support is despite the fact that Novell characterizes TNC as a vendor-neutral open standard, and “the way things will go”. Still, TNC compatibility is not yet in the works “at this point”, and Linux support merely “may be” in the works.

It just seems to me like Novell is rushing this product to market, in order to claim “me too!” when other vendors speak of their having Network Access Control products available, and in the process appear to be quite disorganized and give the appearance that Linux endpoints are either few and far between and therefore not worthy of the development investment, or just not a priority to Novell – a self proclaimed “Linux Company”.

This one has them seeming more and more like the “Windows Complement” some had foreseen.

So, please allow myself to introduce… myself. And, yes, this is a completely personal entry – no news or anything, so if you are uninterested you can save yourself a few minutes. I just would feel weird if I started broadcasting into everyone’s RSS readers and they have no bloody idea who I am.

As I have said, I am here in America – Lawng Eyeland, New Yawk, and am currently employed by my local school district as a Custodial Worker (essentially a Janitor/Maintenance position), having left the IT world behind me some 5 years ago – I worked for a large software company that I consider slightly more evil than Microsoft. Seriously.

A couple of years ago, I purchased a “unique fixer-upper opportunity”, the worst house <strikethrough>on the block<⁄strikethrough> in the neighborhood, and have taught myself how to renovate and repair it for the last few years. Now, I am going back and redoing much of it, just properly ;^ ) Honestly, it’s probably the 2nd best house on the block these days, and I am pretty proud. Also, I am apparently one of the few Americans who hasn’t received a foreclosure notice yet – and I am pretty proud of that, too.

In regards to establishing my Geek-Cred, I am a GNU/Linux user for some time now, and try to give back by setting up EDU-Nix.org which distributes a Slax-based Live CD (and soon a Live USB, which is much more practical we have found) that is geared towards school students. Mainly, I work with a couple of teachers in my school in tweaking and creating some district-specific vocabulary lists and such for use with the KDE EDU Suite, as well as the Tux4Kids stuff – which is wildly popular with the students (Tux Paint in particular). I even try to push OpenOffice.org sometimes, but that hasn’t quite taken off – except for the export to PDF functionality, which raised an eyebrow or two – “What do you mean, it’s free?”. Occasionally, I get to updating the site and making a more generic version of the CD/USB we work on available for download, something I am hoping to do more often as winter sets in here.

Anyhow, I started BoycottNovell.com a few days after the announcement of the deal – it was not a hasty decision on my behalf, partly because I knew deep down that although I was deeply disturbed by many aspects of the deal and felt compelled to speak out, that the time necessary to do it well was something that I lacked. Shortly after beginning the site, I tapped Roy to help out – and boy has he – it’s fair to say that this is ‘his’ site now, and I am just the man behind the curtain raking in all those Adsense dollars that cause controversy from time to time – some of that dollar-fifty a day likely comes from Microsoft and/or Novell ads, sorry it’s true. It’s a little funny, because I never see the ads – and judging by those paltry click numbers for such a popular site – neither do many of you ;^ )

One thing I have always hoped for with this site is that it would host some insightful discussions regarding the “deal and its subtle (yet severe) implications”, and have absolutely abhorred censorship in any way – whether they be Microsoft ads or a differing opinion from a visitor. It’s with that in mind that I have released the 50 or so non-spam-seeming comments still in moderation, mainly from someone called ‘eet’ – I don’t get it, but whatever – Shane is a pretty odd name, too. As always, I hope we can keep it somewhat civil and relatively mature here, and maybe even on-topic sometimes (this off-topic post aside, I guess). In my opinion, it’s unreasonable to embrace the community development model for software problems, but not for sociopolitical ones that affect our community – by having these discussions, hopefully our understanding of these situations can grow and maybe we can even come up with a solution or two.

I truly hope that the next few days bring us a juicy story; last time I was here, there was the OpenOffice.org fork controversy and Red Hat and Novell were hit with patent infringement suits shortly after Mr Ballmer predicted just such an occurrence – it was kinda eerie. Then, I was really floored when it was announced that Microsoft was extending their covenant to GPLv3 software, once such was shipped in SLE. It was a busy few days, I had fun.

Well, it’s good to meet you (or see you again, for some readers) and I hope that I can be the capable fill-in that the site deserves for the next few days: I think of myself as Joan Rivers filling in for Johnny Carson, but without so much plastic surgery. Well, I did have some work done, but I digress…

Oh, and since someone griped last time, I have never promised to do-no-evil on Saturdays – that’s Roy’s gig – if Novell or anyone else in the “Linux Ecosystem” irks me, I am not going to hold back just cuz it’s the weekend. hehe

However, Meeks is not ruling out an eventual forking of OOO if Sun refuses to give up its control of the project and establish an independent non-profit foundation to govern it.

Concerns about a possible fork arose because the Go-OO build, an OpenOffice implementation maintained by Meeks and others, decided to include a feature that Sun rejected for inclusion in the next OpenOffice because the developer refused to sign Sun’s contributor agreement.

Meeks said in an interview that it is customary for Go-OO to include new technologies and that the latest build should not be viewed as a fork. But he hinted that a fork is not out of the question if Sun doesn’t loosen its grip on the OpenOffice project.

“It’s clear that if Sun continues to refuse to include changes under their own license then you will see a growing set of changes that can’t be included in OpenOffice, and then we’d see that delta increasing over time. Eventually, users can understand they can get a better OpenOffice than at OpenOffice.org,” Meeks said this week during a telephone interview.

It would appear, that according to Simon Phipps, Sun is at this time content with the changes that they have made in recent weeks – including the replacing of the Contributor Agreement and creation of a Community Advisory Board. Phipps goes on to question Meeks’ motivation for mounting this challenge now, after having been an historical supporter of the contributor agreement.

In his blast at Novell’s Meeks, Phipps points to great strides made by OpenOffice over the past several months, including new participation by Red Flag 2000 and IBM.

“In the midst of all this, I see my friend Michael Meeks has been challenging Sun in a creative way – it even made Slashdot today. I remember the days when Michael used to enthusiastically encourage OpenOffice.org community members to sign the contributor agreement, as recently as last December…,” Phipps wrote on his blog recently, questioning Mr Meeks’ motives. It’s a shame Michael has chosen now – a turning point in OpenOffice.org and a moment when Sun has radically improved the SCA in response to broad feedback from many communities – as a time to mount a fresh challenge to Sun that by implication also harms OpenOffice.org. And when you distill out all the details, that’s what this turns out to be even by Michael’s admission – a competitive issue, not a community one.”

So, it appears that the line in the sand has been drawn between Sun and Meeks, yet we still have not heard anything in an official capacity from Novell. I would expect there to be quite a bit more from both sides on this highly contentious subject in the coming weeks leading up to the first meeting of the Community Advisory Board, and perhaps beyond.

This protection extends far beyond our broad Novell Indemnification Program; you also benefit from the Novell and Microsoft patent cooperation agreement. It ensures that when you buy any Novell products—whether Linux-based or proprietary—you receive a patent covenant from Microsoft. The Novell Technology Assurance Program also affirms our willingness to use the large Novell software patent portfolio as a deterrent to patent aggression. With the Novell Technology Assurance Program and our ownership of the UNIX copyright, we are able to support our customers with one of the most extensive IP protection offerings in the industry.

So, Novell now wants to remind you they have the double whammy in IP protection – a covenant and patent license for themselves and customers from our friends in Redmond, in addition to ownership of the Unix copyrights. Feel free to go check out the details, but the first thing I clicked on floored me: Microsoft is extending their covenant to GPLv3, once a GPLv3 program is in SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Microsoft has extended its covenant to not sue users of Linux-based products from Novell to all GPL v3 users as soon as GPL v3 code is integrated into SUSE Linux Enterprise. This means that the patent protection Microsoft extends to Novell customers now covers every customer who uses any Linux-based software that Novell distributes under GPL v3.

I’m not sure if that means that Microsoft is embracing GPLv3, is confident they can beat GPLv3 in court, or if it means Novell will simply never include v3 code in SLE.

I’ll be poking around the NTAP site some more in the A.M., it’s getting a bit late and I’m bleary eyed. I don’t know how Roy does this so prolifically, sometimes I think there are two of him ;^ ).

So, keeping that in mind, realize I am not particularly comfortable writing about the current layoffs at Novell. However, this story really shocked me, I must admit.

Apparently, Novell has layed off the AppArmor team (and it’s confirmed, so this isn’t like when it appeared that the Samba developers left Novell, but hadn’t – a little embarrassing).

Two years after acquiring the company that developed the AppArmor security software for Linux, Novell has laid off team members behind the project, CNET News.com has learned.

AppArmor’s founder and leader, Crispin Cowan, joined Novell in 2005 when it acquired his company, Immunix, which developed the software. But he and four others from the project lost their Novell jobs in Portland, Ore., on September 28, Cowan confirmed.

However, he plans to continue AppArmor development. He and two other laid-off AppArmor programmers, Steve Beattie and Dominic Reynolds, launched an AppArmor consulting company on Wednesday called Mercenary Linux.

The article goes on to say, from a rather cold economic perspective, that Novell intends to rely on the AppArmor community to lead development of the project since it is an even lower-cost option than outsourcing.

With the adoption of AppArmor really beginning to take off, in my mind, it seems rather odd that Novell would dissociate itself from the core team in such a way – as Cowan put it, "tossing it in the wind and hoping" – yet Novell terms it as "improving our product development process".

What are we to make of this rather sudden, somewhat shocking (even to Crispin Cowan) move? It’s like Novell wanted to embrace the "Bazaar" development model, and just now is going to a bizarre development model.

P.S.
Best of luck to the Mercenary Linux folks (great name, by the way!).

Recently, in his most recent FUD eruption regarding Red Hat and alleged Microsoft IP violations, the Microsoft CEO also implied that one day soon other companies would "go to the open source world".

That’s why we’ve done the deal we have with Novell, where not only are we working on technical interoperability between Linux and Windows but we’ve also made sure that we could provide the appropriate, for the appropriate fee, Novell customers also get essentially the rights to use our patented intellectual property. And I think it’s great the way Novell stepped up to kind of say intellectual property matters. People use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property in a sense have an obligation to eventually to compensate us. [emphasis ours]

There are plenty of other people who may also have intellectual property. And every time an Eolas comes to Microsoft and says, “Pay us,” I suspect they also would like to eventually go to the open source world. So getting what I’ll call an intellectual property interoperability framework between the two worlds I think is important.

Well, it appears that a company known as IP Innovation LLC is now filing suit against Red Hat and Novell, regarding a patent for "a User Interface with Multiple Workspaces for Sharing Display System Objects". Having adopted a no-look policy regarding spurious software patents, I cannot comment on any specifics (the patent number is below for the curious and masochistic).

IP Innovation LLC et al vs. Red Hat Inc. et al

Plaintiffs IP Innovation and Technology Licensing Corp. claim to have the rights to U.S. Patent No. 5,072,412 for a User Interface with Multiple Workspaces for Sharing Display System Objects issued Dec. 10, 1991 along with two other similar patents.

Defendants Red Hat Inc. and Novell have allegedly committed acts of infringement through products including the Red Hat Linux system, the Novell Suse Linex[SIC] Enterprise Desktop and the Novell Suse Linex[SIC] Enterprise Server.

“Red Hat’s and Novell’s infringement, contributory infringement and inducement to infringe has injured plaintiffs and plaintiffs are entitled to recover damages adequate to compensate them for such infringement but in no event less than a reasonable royalty,” the original complaint states.

The plaintiffs also allege that defendants received notice of the patents, therefore the infringing activities have been deliberate and willful.

Plaintiffs are seeking an injunction from the court, increased damages and other relief that the court or a jury may deem just and proper.

T. John Ward Jr. of Ward & Smith Law Firm in Longview is representing the plaintiff.

The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Leonard E. Davis.

Case No. 2:07-cv-00447-LED

Now, I don’t believe this is the first infringement suit that has ever been filed against Red Hat, but is this the leading edge of a new wave of litigation spurred on by Mr. Ballmer’s repeated accusations? We’ll have to wait and see, I suppose. In the meantime, can anyone think of any prior art for having ‘multiple workspaces’ in your GUI?

Update:
The folks at Groklaw have picked up the ball and started running on this one, so you can find fairly comprehensive coverage of this suit and possible connections between the plaintiff (an Acacia subsidiary) and our friends from Redmond over there as well.

San Diego, CA – October 10th, 2007 – Linspire, Inc., developer of the Linspire commercial and Freespire community desktop Linux operating systems and CNR.com, a free Linux software delivery service, today announced the immediate availability of Linspire 6.0, the latest commercial release of the desktop Linux operating system. Building on the best of open source software using Ubuntu as its base line, Linspire 6.0 adds licensed proprietary drivers, codecs, and software in its core distribution to provide a better user experience. The first commercial release from Linspire, Inc. in over two years, Linspire 6.0 continues its traditional focus on ease-of-use and bundles proprietary software where there are no viable open source alternatives, providing improved hardware, file type, and multimedia support, such as MP3, Real, Java, Flash, ATI, nVidia, WiFi, and many more. Linspire 6.0 is also the first commercial release to incorporate several technologies from Microsoft including Windows Media, True Type Fonts, as well as Open XML translators that allow OpenOffice to open and edit Microsoft Word .docx formatted documents.

Well, this should be a boon for the folks from Linspire, as it is well known throughout the Free World that the biggest impediment to GNU/Linux adoption has been an overwhelming fear of potential IP infringement suits from our friends in Redmond, in addition to the lack of "Times New Roman" by default. Right.

Recently, Ron Hovsepian has spoken with SiliconRepublic.com regarding the Microsoft deal and it’s effects on the woebegone Novell. Honestly, there are very few ‘new’ pieces of information to be gleaned from the interview, but there were perhaps a couple of notable assertions by the CEO.

Up to 17 New Collaboration Project Areas

Hovsepian said that as part of the pact both Microsoft and Novell would meet on a quarterly basis to review the current status of the project and that this has resulted in up to 17 new potential project areas emerging.

“These really came from the customers who are driving this. We’ll be meeting later this month to discuss these new projects and some of these we’ll make public in the not-to-distant future.”

Preloaded SUSE Desktops

“The desktop element is particularly critical”, he added. “PSA Peugeot has selected us to replace over 20,000 desktops with SUSE Linux. In India, Tamil Nadu Electronics have chosen us to replace over 30,000 desktops with SUSE Linux. Dell in China and Lenovo have both committed to pre-load SUSE Linux so our desktop strategy is getting stronger and stronger.

I would be remiss to not remind readers of Lenovo’s recent deal with Microsoft, as Roy so presciently deduced at the time, it seems to have finally enabled them to deliver on their repeated promises of SUSE preinstalls. Kinda sounds like when Dell got permission from our friends in Redmond to sell, er I mean meet (but not create) customer demand, for GNU/Linux.

Well, now let’s look at the present times – all over the web, reports abound about the Novell-Sun rift and Michael Meeks forking of OpenOffice.org. Some say it is a fork, some say it is not, and this all sounds very familiar but a little confusing – again.

Charles H. Schulz has written a piece that was published on Groklaw which attempts to shed some light on the background of the dispute, and offers some conjecture on what Meeks’ motivation may be:

Bear with me now: The OpenOffice.org project is developing import filters for OpenXML, but not export filters. Why? Because, I believe, it does not want to make a service to Microsoft by being the second major office suite to produce OpenXML documents on the fly. Novell sees this issue from a different point of view, but let’s not get carried away. Working with Microsoft on interoperability, as Novell claims, includes working on OpenXML filters and plugins. While Novell contributes quite normally to OpenOffice.org’s import filters, it is also developing an OpenXML export filter that won’t be available in OpenOffice.org– that is, if you choose to use OpenOffice.org and not “Open Office, Novell Edition”. And since these export filters are supposedly developed in collaboration with Microsoft, this technology would logically include Microsoft’s sacred intellectual property that Sun and many others don’t want to see covered by the JCA. This could, perhaps, explain Michael’s odd questions on this list of OpenOffice.org

So these new builds from Novell would thus include new features, but features that will carry sometimes an unverified intellectual property. And that’s certainly an issue if Microsoft joins the game. Would that mean Michael’s move was made in order to serve some corporate interests?

So, it looks like Novell is indeed intent on making available a fully OOXML-compatible, yet likely IP-encumbered, version of Novell OpenOffice.org – features that will not or cannot be sent back upstream. Of course, they cannot rightfully be expected to pay Microsoft their per-unit royalty on all copies of OOO that is distributed, as their thirty pieces of silver just doesn’t stretch that far, so fork they must.

Hey, who knows, perhaps over in that joint-interoperability lab of theirs, Microvell is also working on full native ODF support for Microsoft Office. (I’m still pulling for you to be right, Stafford, and sometimes I wish I was more often wrong.)