01.04.07
Novell Could Buy a Virtualisation Company
With one major deal, another could soon follow. You may wish to head over to InforWorld’s Open Sources where Matt Asay speculates that Novell will acquire XenSource or Altiris with the money it has received from Microsoft. XenSource is already collaborating with Microsoft (at least to at some level of capacity) and I suspect it has a new branch of operation in Redmond, WA. Its recent commercial moves seem to make this merger/acquisition probable.
XenSource, Inc., the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen hypervisor, today announced XenEnterprise for Windows and Linux, the market’s first commercially-packaged Xen virtualization solution supporting both Microsoft Windows and Linux guests.
If a merger as such (takeover rather, due to scale differences) ever became a reality, it would have a negative effect on rivalling GNU/Linux distributors such as Red Hat and Mandriva.
Note: We apologise for a downtime that was experienced earlier today. We have good reasons to suspect that there are/were malicious hacking attempts. We are still investigating this incident.
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.
David Mohring (NZheretic) said,
January 4, 2007 at 9:02 am
05/12/2005 Xen and the art of Coexistence
http://www.itgarage.com/node/594
(Microsoft was in talks with the folks at Redhat a year before the deal with Novell.)
Also consider that if Microsoft purchased XenSource directly then VMWare and the other virtualization vendors would rightly scream “Antitrust”, since Microsoft would be building versions of Vista/WindowsServer targeted to work with Xen’s Paravirtualization mode. Maybe such Antitrust issues could be avoided by Novell purchasing XenSource ( using funds provided by Microsoft in November ) and Microsoft and Novell working on getting Microsoft’s OSs and Xen together ( under the *existing* Novell Microsoft November agreement ).
Of more concern is Microsoft and Novell collaborating to produce a close source DRM enforcing Xen host system, to lock you out of your hardware …
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/19522
… no matter if it puts your security at risk…
http://itheresies.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_itheresies_archive.html
shane said,
January 4, 2007 at 10:13 am
PSA for bloggers:
Wordpress 2.0.5 and below have a wormable XSS vulnerability
http://michaeldaw.org/md-hacks/wordpress-templatephp-exploit/
I don’t think it was related to whatever the heck happened last night, we were patched, but anyone running WP 2.0.5 should apply at least the patched templates.php
http://trac.wordpress.org/changeset/4665
At this time, it appears there was no damage or changes made when compared to a backup from earlier in the day, so we are going on with business as usual and chalking it all up to the wonders of computers.
Shane Coyle said,
January 17, 2007 at 12:33 am
Stafford Masie, Novell South Africa country manager, at the CITI forum a few weeks ago, referred to Microsoft and Novell teaming up against VMware (EMC):
http://boycottnovell.com/2006/12/27/stafford-masie-presentation-at-citi-forum-transcript/ ( last few paragraphs before the tape cuts off, scroll down )
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