12.01.07
Do-No-Evil Saturday - Part V: The Past Week’s Leftovers
Novell conducted a survey in Ireland and it shows the growing appeal of GNU/Linux at the expense of UNIX.
Almost two thirds of Irish IT experts say the main motivation for migrating to the Linux operating system from UNIX for use in servers is cost, according to a recent survey from Novell’s Open Enterprise Summit in Dublin.
The growth of Linux and the slow demise of UNIX is something which a more quantitative study showed several days ago as well.
Novell also published some promotional Linux material and spread it around the Web.
Novell has released a bunch of whitepapers in support of Open Source technologies over Microsoft products, hardly a surprise really but at least Novell outlines in it’s documents why such a move would benefit you or your IT department. It outlines how SUSE Linux is more cost effective over Windows Vista and how Open Office is a good alternative to the Microsoft Office suite, mainly because it is free and can do just about all that its rival has to offer.
Several new eDirectory videos have from Novell India. Here is one of them.
In the Wall Street Journal, one can find some interesting bits about Novell’s advertising.
The videos have also brought some new opportunities. Earlier this year, Novell Inc., a Waltham, Mass., provider of open-source software and services, paid Blendtec about $5,000 to do a “Will It Blend?” video for a company event. In the movie, a number of items got blended: a Microsoft Vista CD, razor blades, a stuffed animal, a flash drive and a Red Bull beverage.
“We thought this would be something fun for our customer base,” says Russ Dastrup, Novell’s corporate videographer. The message? “Novell Technology allows you to blend a variety of operating systems and applications into a seamless network,” Mr. Dastrup says.
Novell is mentioned in Forbes as well, but the context is entirely different.
For example, in 2001, Novell, a well-known software maker, was in the midst of a major turnaround when its CEO, Eric Schmidt, abruptly quit. After Schmidt left the company to join Google, Novell lacked direction, and its sales waned. In fact, the firm wandered aimlessly for about a year until new management finally righted the ship through corporate restructuring and product refinement.
Making matters worse, Schmidt unloaded a portion of his stock position in the open market. The outcome was that Novell’s share price dropped from roughly $4.75 to below $2 in the following year. In this case, investors could have saved themselves a great deal of money had they sold off their stock once they heard this top officer had jumped ship.
TIBCO has released a major product and SUSE Linux is part of it.
TIBCO also collaborated with operating system vendors to help reduce overall end-to-end latency, including testing and releasing concurrently with SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10 from Novell. “Cutting microseconds out of applications that are already low latency requires vendors to work together, and working with TIBCO Rendezvous is important to our customers,” said Moiz Kohari, vice president of engineering for Open Platform Solutions at Novell. “Our continued work to optimize TIBCO Rendezvous with SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time gives our joint customers an out-of-the-box, low-latency solution with the support they need to deliver the next generation of ultra-low latency market data and transactional systems.”
This is probably the first time that these weekly digests are sliced into as many as 5 separate installments. There has been a lot to keep track of and mention. █
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.