12.14.07
Do-No-Evil Saturday - Part III: What Else is GNU at Novell?
This post is merely a spillover/leftover of news from the past week.
Condolences
Layoffs are a terrible thing that affects families in the most terrible of ways. We are always sad to hear about Novell layoffs but happy to see that Novell is supportive. Novell’s talent deserves great opportunities is other places.
Since the layoffs of about 200 workers were made known in October, Novell has hosted networking conferences like the one Friday and has hired an outplacement firm to assist displaced employees with job seeking, resumes and interviewing.
“We would love to see everybody get new jobs,” said Novell spokesman Kevan Barney. “So we do everything we reasonably can.”
Miscellany
There is a new section with information on compliance with PCI-DSS at Novell’s Web site.
Payment Card Industry & Data Security Standard
You can also find some further discussion about the real-time products from Red Hat and Novell. In this article there is no focus on the recent feud.
In this regard, Enterprise MRG is similar to Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time, or SLERT 10, variant of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. However, Enterprise MRG is more than just a real-time operating system, as the name suggests, and even where there are similarities, Che says that Red Hat is being careful to use the same set of compilers for both RHEL and Enterprise MRG so applications certified for RHEL (in either a physical or virtual instance) will be supported without the need to recertify on Enterprise MRG. (He suggested that Novell, by adopting extensions to the GNU GCC compiler set with SLERT 10, was requiring software makers and in-house software developers to recertify their SLES 10 applications on SLERT 10.) In any event, Novell charges $2,500 per server for the SLERT extensions to SLES 10, which costs $799 for a standard license. You can expect the same kind of premium price for Enterprise MRG relative to RHEL 5.1 licenses.
Dick Williams, who used to work at Novell in the past, settles in a new home
He then served as president and CEO of Digital Research, which was later acquired by Novell. At Novell Williams served as executive vice president of sales and support, and general manager of Novell’s Digital Research Systems Group.
Novell is likely to continue acquiring some small companies, unless it carries on losing money and resorts to buybacks. That’s pretty much what Ron Hovsepian told Rueters several months ago.█
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.