08.29.08
Novell’s Roger Levy on “Peace of Mind”
This outrageous “Peace of Mind” chorus continues. Last week it was Ian Bruce, Novell’s PR Director, who sang “Intellectual Property Peace of Mind”. We wanted to believe that it was a slip of the tongue (saying the truth instead of lying as usual), but watch this new article about Microsoft. It features a rave from a Novell SVP: [note: emphasis is ours]
“Technical support of virtualized images is an industrywide challenge,” said Roger Levy, senior vice president and general manager of open platform solutions at Novell. “Novell and Microsoft continue to collaborate to optimize bidirectional virtualization between Windows Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise with Xen. Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program provides customers with additional peace of mind when they run Windows as a guest in a validated environment such as SUSE Linux Enterprise.”
Who is Novell fooling? It’s too obviously about software patent, as we’ve already shown before. Microsoft is fostering its own version of GNU/Linux (or a Microsoft-obedient/approved GNU/Linux) with which to play ‘nice’ and appease antitrust regulators. But still — it’s all about software patents and thus ‘Microsoft tax’.
According to this new press release from Microsoft (regarding Nikon), “Over the past two years, Microsoft has entered into similar agreements with Alpine Electronics Inc., Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd., Kenwood Corp., Kyocera Mita Corp., LG Electronics, NEC Corp., Nortel Networks, Novell Inc., Olympus Corp., Onkyo Corp., Pentax, Samsung, Seiko Epson Corp. and Victor Co. of Japan Ltd. (JVC).”
Rather than build better products, Microsoft may be developing a new business strategy. █
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.
pcole said,
August 29, 2008 at 8:25 am
How do we know M$ doesn’t already own novell? Judging by what’s going on between them M$ owns them but will not publicize it to avoid getting hammered by anti-trust rulings.
I already look at it that way. When we mention anything GNU/FOSS at our IT staff meetings concerning migrations left to do and new server builds, novell (opnsuse-sled(s), xandros, turbolinux, xen, mono, are just not equated with FOSS.