02.03.10
Posted in Novell at 9:30 am by Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A mindmap connecting entities that we regularly cover here and how they are connected
THIS diagram is work in progress and it may somehow resemble this one from 2007. It is coarse and simple, even ugly. It is intended to be used, not to impress in any way and it was requested/suggested by a reader who wrote: “Why shouldn’t the individuals who give the orders be seen? Expose them! Start with Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs! If the public sees them for who they really are about, this would reform these emperors! Public image is so important to insure their followers, right?”
The lines in this diagram are implicit and can each be explained, but that would lead to more clutter. In case the arrows obscure some text, most of the blocks are listed at the bottom as text and the list is obviously partial, so as to focus on issues that Boycott Novell actually covers or covered. █
Click image for full-sized version (~260KB)
Among the text (not complete):
- IBM
- Ron Hovsepian
- Novell
- Citrix/Xen
- Apple
- Steve Jobs
- RIAA/MPAA
- Disney/Hollywood
- Nokia
- Xandros
- Samsung
- LG
- Korea
- US DOJ
- Govt of UK
- Govt of India
- Govt of Ireland
- Govt of Canada
- Justin Steinman
- Oil giants (industry)
- Monsanto
- Pharmaceutical industry
- Nathan Myhrvold (IV)
- Acacia
- European Commission
- Neelie Kroes
- Siim Kallas
- Bill Gates
- BSA
- Gates Senior
- Gates Foundation
- ACT
- CompTIA
- ISO
- OSI
- Apache
- Gartner
- Burton
- IDG/IDC
- Forrester
- Red Hat
- OLPC
- Google
- Canonical/Ubuntu
- Debian
- Obama administration
- US banking
- Microsoft
- SCO
- Lenovo
- EMC
- VMware
- HP
- Dell
- Corel
- ECMA/OOXML
- Adobe
- BECTA
- NHS
- Accenture
- Infosys
- NASSCOM
- NBC
- GE
- Comcast
- Sun
- Wikipedia
- Oracle
- Java
- Yahoo
- BSD
- FSF
- FSFE
- KDE
- GNOME
- Mandriva
- Miguel de Icaza
- SUSE
- Linux Foundation
- Linus Torvalds/Linux
- EPO
- USPTO
- FDA
- TiVo
- TomTom
- Amazon
- Edelman/W-E
- Steve Ballmer
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Patents, Ubuntu at 8:09 am by Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Google Books settlement and how it relates to Microsoft, its dirty tricks, and the gradual pollution of GNU/Linux code pool by Novell and others
CONVICTED MONOPOLIST Microsoft has tried almost everything against Google, without any success (Microsoft’s share in search is said to be further declining globally). Recently we’ve found reports about a lawsuit against Google’s book-scanning endeavours [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], which are exactly what Microsoft was doing until it lost the race and gave up scanning. Microsoft fuels this lawsuit, which shows its sheer hypocrisy. Microsoft even directly sued Google, but not for doing what Microsoft itself used to do, although it’s related.
Here is the FSF jumping to defend Google’s book-scanning (liberating information):
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) filed another objection in court to the proposed amended Google Book Search settlement (The Authors Guild, Inc., et al. v. Google Inc.). The objection notes that proposed amendments which discuss works under free licenses unfairly burden their authors with ensuring license compliance, and urges the court to reject the proposed settlement unless it incorporates terms that better address the needs of authors using free licenses like the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).
Groklaw agrees with the FSF and it brings together Comes vs Microsoft exhibits to show how it also relates to Novell’s Mono. It is a long analysis, so here are some portions:
That’s the dream of more than book publishers. Here’s an exhibit from the Comes v. Microsoft antitrust case of a few years back, Exhibit 3590 [PDF]. It’s a discussion in 1994 with Bill Gates and his executives about the Internet, and it includes an email from Nathan Myhrvold on how Microsoft could in time take over control of the Internet.
[...]
Old-fashioned copyright owners want the Internet to cut it out and be about them feeding us content and we sit back and just consume what they send us. After we pay. And agree to DRM.
Of course, it’s funny, what Myhrvold wrote, in that they totally missed the boat about the Internet, and about Linux, but that’s a good thing. They probably could have killed Linux early on, had they tried. Their arrogance has cost them. It’s too late now, hopefully, to just crush it, not that they haven’t been trying. They’ll have to buy community members to sell out and write their software to run on Windows instead of Linux now one by one, if they can find enough greedy types, and that takes longer even in Microsoft’s best case scenario.
[...]
I hope the EU Commission is reading Groklaw at moments like this. The email is from 1995, but didn’t they do what he suggested? I’m remembering the Microsoft extensions to HTML. I’m also thinking about OOXML. There’s lots more in the exhibit about their browser plans, but are you thinking Silverlight? I am. Here’s a snip from one last exhibit, Exhibit 3589 [PDF], an email thread with a memo shared with the top brass at Microsoft on how to get the Internet away from open standards bit by bit:
I recommend a recipe not unlike the one we’ve used with our TCP/IP efforts: embrace, extend, then innovate.
Phase I (Embrace): all participants need to establish a solid understanding of the infostructure and the community – determine the needs and the trends of the user base. Only then can we effectively enable Microsoft system products to be great Internet systems.
Phase II (Extend): establish relationships with the appropriate organizations and corporations with goals similar to ours. Offer well-integrated tools and services compatible with established and popular standards that have been developed in the Internet community.
Phase 3 (Innovate): move into a leadership role with new Internet standards as appropriate, enable standard off-the-shelf titles with Internet awareness. Change the rules: Windows becomes the next-generation Internet tool of the future.
Are you reading this Apache guys? Ubuntu Mono freaks? In the “Potential Risks” section on page 15:
Microsoft/Internet Culture Clash. – One of the biggest challenges facing Microsoft’s success in the Internet community is acceptance and respect. Although we have an incredible amount of respect in the commercial software business, the Internet has been founded on public domain protocols and products which generally included source availability at no charge. It has been only recently that vendors have suggested profiting from the Internet by selling the browsing tools and technologies, and offering commercial services on the Internet itself. The information and software has been free for 15 years, we need to be careful to embrace the current technologies and community before we attempt to reshape it.
Put ‘Open Source’ everywhere in that snip where it says ‘Internet’ and you have the picture. They pretend to be with you, sharing goals, and then they win. If you are stupid enough to fall for the “let’s be friends” part of their scheme.
Their concept of the Internet is that it’s a strip mall. They want it to be *their* strip mall.
“Ubuntu Mono freaks” is what Pamela Jones calls those who divert Ubuntu users to Microsoft [1, 2]. Yes, it’s no secret that Groklaw too has realised that Mono is a trap (even before the FSF made official statements about it).
Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza has this new interview where he speaks about Microsoft software like Mono and Moonlight. GNU/Linux users reject these, so Windows and Mac OS X are increasingly targeted by Miguel and fellow Microsoft boosters. From the interview:
A couple of recent major milestones are:
• Mono for the iPhone: the MonoTouch products, a major effort to simplify iPhone development and bring garbage collection, type safety and all of the features from .NET to iPhone developers.
• We have also just released a plug-in to Visual Studio that allows developers to move their applications from Windows to Linux, create RPM packages from Visual Studio and even use our SUSEStudio.com website to create full appliances from their software projects.
Linux Today has some more comments about it.
A couple of months ago there was a big “copyright assignment” debate promoted by Novell’s Meeks and The Source explains how it may also relate to Mono:
Copyright Assignment is a tricky topic in the FLOSS world.
[...]
The first time copyright assignment drew my attention was in how Novell’s go-oo hypocritically uses it as FUD against Open Office, and – of course – how ignorant and/or malicious mono apologists used it as a talking point.
We wrote about Go-oo in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Oracle will hopefully keep Novell from ruining OpenOffice.org. Sun was certainly angry with Novell at times. █
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Posted in Finance, Microsoft, Novell, Patents at 7:24 am by Roy Schestowitz
“I’ve heard from Novell sales representatives that Microsoft sales executives have started calling the Suse Linux Enterprise Server coupons “royalty payments”…”
–Matt Asay, April 21st, 2008
Summary: Brian Proffitt, former Managing Editor of LinuxToday, looks at the amounts of money Novell extracts from SUSE users for Microsoft and Novell to share
YESTERDAY we commented on a report suggesting that the ridiculous SUSE coupons run out about 2 years before the Microsoft/Novell patent deal actually expires. Over at IDG, some of the numbers are put together but nothing is said about the fact that these are akin to extortion money — funds that Microsoft is taking from GNU/Linux users for software patents it claims they infringe without giving any details and without obeying the law, which explicitly forbids software patents in the large majority of the world.
And what an investment it has been: an initial payment of US$348 million to Novell… with US$240 million tagged specifically for those infamous subscription certificates for SUSE Enterprise Linux to hand out or resell to interested customers. Indeed, this was the thrust of the SD Times article: that Microsoft is almost through passing these coupons out.
The thought that was actually provoked came from this sentence in the article: “A total of 475 customers have used an unspecified number of coupons, according to Microsoft.”
This struck me as a very interesting figure, because after firing up XCalc, I figured out that if indeed just 475 customers have received these coupons, then Microsoft has essentially subsidized SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) deployments an average tune of US$505,263.16 per customer.
Keep in mind that while we have no idea of how many actual single- or multi-year subscriptions were actually used with these disbursements, we can get a very rough idea based on Novell’s current pricing structure of how many boxes this may represent.
This means money to Microsoft, not just Novell. So how much in royalties does Novell make from each sale of Windows? None? And if so, then what kind of a relationship is this? █
“Now [Novell is] little better than a branch of Microsoft”
–LinuxToday Managing Editor
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02.02.10
Posted in Deception, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, OIN, Patents at 11:03 am by Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Jeff Jaffe’s broken link (still available in the CTO blog) shows fanaticism for software patents at Novell; Microsoft’s cash infusion for Novell is running out
Jaffe is leaving Novell, as we noted almost 2 months ago. Jaffe’s announcement of departure appeared in Novell’s PR blogs, but the URL from PR blogs was dropped about a day ago*, so links to it broke and instead there is only this direct link. A closer look is worthwhile. Based on the post from Jaffe:
Inventive people who write more software patents per capita than anywhere else.
Software patents: A Novell metric for success.
Our reader Brandon has noticed that too:
Novell – Software Patents = Success
[...]
I find it hilarious and interesting that Novell considers a large number of software patents as a good thing. It seems to use this as a measure of their success. This is against the community belief that software patents are bad and immoral. This is a dangerous idea when you consider how much free and open source software is written by Novell. How much software could they force us not to use because of patents?
Jeff Jaffe — just like Novell’s CEO — came from IBM [1, 2], where software patents are seen as a good thing. Jaffe will be leaving while still partly accountable for Novell’s failure and Novell can only pretend to be a friend of Free software with its membership in the OIN (IBM too is the key member, but it does not mean it has an issue with software patents).
“More people need to understand what goes on behind the PR, which is simply posturing.”Novell is very problematic to GNU/Linux as a free (gratis and libre) platform. More people need to understand what goes on behind the PR, which is simply posturing. We are sure that Novell employees are nice people with families and feelings, but the interests they serve are not compatible with the philosophy required for freedom to triumph.
It is probably a good time to mention that following Worthington's visit to Microsoft/Novell he produces decent coverage that seems to be balanced, but he is quoting DiDio yet again (he did so before, along with Microsoft employees who maybe connected him with her [1, 2, 3]), perhaps not realising what she is to Microsoft. His article is titled “Microsoft exhausts coupons for SUSE Linux”
Microsoft has distributed nearly all of the US$240 million worth of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription certificates that it purchased from Novell as part of a 2006 patent indemnification pact, the companies said.
[...]
Controversy surrounding the indemnification agreement inspired a provision in the GNU General Public License v3 that bars similar patent agreements going forward.
“Generally speaking, most software companies have attacked each other with patents; software patents are quite a drain on productivity of the software industry in this regard,” said Bradley Kuhn, a policy analyst and tech director at the Software Freedom Law Center, which provides legal services to Linux companies.
“But I am not readily aware of anything specific between Novell and Microsoft before their deal. If it was a large enough dispute that it made it to court, the court records would presumably show if there was.”
What happens in January 2012? The deal expires in 2 years (23 months to be precise) and then the patent intimidation can creep in, causing trouble for Novell (not just Mono and Moonlight).
Our reader Ryan says “no more Ballnux coupons” and “well, if Microsoft saw an advantage in keeping the vouchers around, they would have bought more before they ran out. They didn’t, that bodes poorly for Novell’s future. Watch Novell stock tank when word starts going around.” █
____
* Maybe they thought it was bad for PR when they showed the CTO leaving (this is being syndicated there, perhaps automatically, then removed manually, but it’s just a guess). Some links from critics, as above, became “page not found” errors (WordPress’ “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria,” to be precise), which served Novell pretty well.
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Posted in Apple, DRM, Deception, FSF, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Novell at 10:06 am by Roy Schestowitz
Summary: As Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier leaves Novell, his positions regarding freedom (and the FSF in particular) are analysed a little further, sometimes by his colleagues
Zonker, the iPad/DRM apologist (his colleagues from Novell, Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman, are pretty much the same) is being shown for his bias against the Free Software Foundation (FSF) over at The Source:
I was mildly interested to see if Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier would continue to spread his special brand of so-close-to-a-lie-why-not-just-call-it-that distortions once he left Novell. Well, now we have an answer:
Yes.
And – brace yourself for a shock here – he is targeting the FSF. Again. This time around, though we are treated to simple poor reason instead of the previous gross misrepresentations of Monsieurs Stallman and Moglen.
Let’s not forget that Moglen incident. Anyway, Novell is looking for someone to replace Zonker and this is now being advertised at IDG, for which Zonker is also doing audiocasts (mostly with colleagues from Novell):
Brockmeier has done a pretty good job while at Novell, coordinating the community and marketing efforts around the popular openSUSE distro. It goes without saying that getting him on board lent a lot of legitimacy to Novell’s business deal with Microsoft in 2006. Brockmeier has a lot of respect in the community, so when he calmly explained why Novell hadn’t made a deal with the devil, people listened.
No, he told lies and he was told off for it. The bias above is telling and Zonker works for this publication, which creates a conflict of interests. He recently started writing for Ars Technica, which is a fan of Mono and Moonlight. On it goes:
I personally did not like Novell’s decision to partner with Microsoft–in particular the patent protection agreement that prompted a knee-jerk response from the free software community to change GPL v3 during its draft phase. At the time, I voiced the opinion that if Microsoft wanted to have integration so badly, it could do it without patent cooperation agreements.
[...]
It will be interesting to see who lands in the now-open Community Manager spot at Novell. Those are going to be some big shoes to fill.
This is actually true (the latter part). █
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01.31.10
Posted in IBM, Microsoft, Novell, OpenSUSE, Ron Hovsepian at 11:18 am by Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Novell’s CTO Jeff Jaffe and Zonker (the symbol of OpenSUSE) say their last words before leaving Novell, replacements are imminent
A Web site called “Boycott Novell” may be biased, but Novell does seem like it's crumbling these days. It is being said by a lot of people outside this Web site. The departure of managers ought to be self explanatory. This post covers just a couple of the latest (there are more), namely those whose last day or week at Novell is right about now.
Jeff Jaffe, Meet Externality
Just a year after he had joined Novell (November 2005), Jaffe played a role in hooking the company up with Microsoft. He gave a talk at the press event announcing the deal, where he explained its technical nature. We wrote about this before [1, 2] and also touched on his professional history (similar to Ron Hovsepian’s because of IBM). In addition, we wrote about his departure before, so it is not exactly news. Novell hid it under the banner of “reorg”, so Ben Kevan, for instance, knew nothing about it until Jeff Jaffe wrote a “goodbye” blog post.
A few days after the news from Zonker, we get the news that Jeff Jaffe, Novells CTO, is also leaving the company for new ventures in life after 4 years.
What does this mean to the company? What really is going on at Novell?
Actually, the news about Jeff Jaffe goes almost a couple of months back. It is surprising how quiet Novell has managed to keep it (same with the departure of Levy).
As we noted here many times before, former Microsoft managers become Novell managers [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8], so it will be interesting to see the professional history of Novell’s new CTO. Here is what Jaffe wrote in his last post:
Nostalgia. I’m writing as I complete my four years at Novell. A great deal achieved—but—as with any company still more to do. Here are my thoughts as I move to my next opportunity.
[...]
The Microsoft partnership has been the most fascinating. An arch-competitor. Building bridges between proprietary and open source. Enormous financial benefit for Novell. Viewed as controversial by some. Two companies kept their focus on the ultimate end goal—meeting customers’ needs—and struck an agreement for everyone’s benefit. My participation in the cultivation and creation of this relationship is my most lasting contribution to our shareholders and personal growth.
He says that Microsoft and Novell “struck an agreement for everyone’s benefit.” Wow, isn’t that a sweeping statement? He must never have heard of the notion of externality, has he? Especially one that punishes his very own suppliers. The deal with Microsoft was an utter failure, as his departure too serves to indicate.
OpenSUSE Leadership
Zonker is leaving Novell and his departure was covered by The H, which is not “big” press, but still, it’s something. “Novell loses Linux community manager” was the headline.
Friday was Zonker’s last day and he wrote about it in his blog:
This week has flown by. Tomorrow will be my last “on duty” day with Novell. I’ve spent much of this week handing off tasks or information to co-workers and saying goodbyes.
Well, “goodbyes” is overselling it a bit — I hope. Since I telecommute, I’ll be just as close to everyone I’ve worked with on Monday as I have been the past two years, and hope to remain in touch with all of the friends I’ve made at Novell and in the openSUSE community long after I stop having an @novell.com address.
Now that Novell is looking for a Zonker replacement, Luc Verhaegen (whom Novell laid off) recommends Martin Lasarsch as community manager. Lasarsch has been around SUSE for ages. █
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Posted in Apple, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Vista 7, Windows at 10:13 am by Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Novell’s obsession with Microsoft (and even Apple) is highlighted using the latest evidence
Last week we wrote about Novell promoting Apple with .NET [1, 2]. Mono is quite naturally a tool that favours proprietary software stacks. Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza created it after he had created GNOME and like many people at Novell, he is fixated on Apple too (in the sense that he likes it), not just Microsoft/Windows. Previously, he complained about Mac OS X people taking more control, but later he drifted away from Freedom and went further into Microsoft’s arms. He even got himself appointed and admitted into the board of Microsoft’s CodePlex Foundation. Being a Microsoft celebrity might help him in some communities other than the Free software one/s.
Here is Charlotte Betterley from Novell’s PR department promoting de Icaza’s work on Apple iPad and .NET. It’s like company policy, not just the infatuations of one man:
Enter MonoTouch. MonoTouch is a software development kit that will enable iPad developers to utilize code and libraries written for the .NET development framework and easier-to-use programming languages such as C#. Microsoft .NET developers will be able to use MonoTouch while fully complying with Apple’s license terms.
We have already written 3 separate posts about why iPad is an enemy of one’s freedom [1, 2, 3]. Nat Friedman, who left Novell some weeks ago, is apparently buying one. Friedman is probably Miguel’s closest colleague and friend (they both founded Ximian) and he also uses an iPhone based on his latest blog post where he makes a reference to “toys” (reminiscent of notorious remarks made about Mono+Windows a few years ago):
Sleep Cycles. This is an iPhone app that uses the iPhone accelerometer to track your sleep. You put it near your pillow and when you toss and turn at night it knows. You set a wake-up time and it rings an alarm to wake you up before your deadline when you’re in a period of light sleep, and will wake up more easily.
This is the type of management overseeing FOSS development at Novell. They are preoccupied with proprietary software and there is a lot of .NET content in SUSE Planet, for example these two posts from Jonathan Pryor’s blog. It’s like this every week.
Gabriel Burt’s blog (he works for Novell) gives this release schedule and announcement of the release of Banshee 1.5.3. So does Aaron Bockover, who raves about “the return of OS X support”. Need it be added that Banshee is a Novell-developed and Novell-only Mono program because of the limits in Microsoft's community promise?
Sandy from Novell has just released this new version of Tomboy, adding Windows-only features to Tomboy (for Vista 7 even, despite the fact that it is scarcely used).
Probably the coolest new feature in this release, courtesy of Stefan Cosma, is support for Windows 7 Jump Lists, which are totally awesome and should be added to GNOME.
Yay. Windows. Gotta love Mono.
So for those Tomboy users who prefer the better/full “Mono experience”, Tomboy is there with more features but only on Windows. We have always said that Mono is helping Windows, not GNU/Linux [1, 2, 3]. It promotes the notion of GNU/Linux as a second-class platform. █
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Posted in Mail, NetWare, Novell, Virtualization at 3:56 am by Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Two weeks of proprietary software news from Novell
ANOTHER IDLE fortnight passes by and Novell is said to be facing more threats from Google’s expansion.
To be fair, Wave is still at an unstable, preview stage, but Google has seemed satisfied thus far just hoping the platform will evolve naturally as a tool for enterprises once companies like Novell and Salesforce.com have a chance to game around with it.
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