08.20.08
Posted in Microsoft, Windows, GNU/Linux, Novell, SLES/SLED, Servers, Interoperability, xandros, Scalix at 6:09 am by Roy Schestowitz
“Our partnership with Microsoft continues to expand.”
–Ron Hovsepian, Novell CEO
Along with Novell, Microsoft continues hijacking GNU/Linux. A press release titled “Microsoft and Novell Expand Successful Interoperability Relationship” has just gone public. The Boston Globe seems to have known about it in advance, so it quickly issued an article which glorifies this disgusting betrayal of the Free software movement and the many thousands of developers involved.
Microsoft Corp.’s unlikely alliance with Linux software vendor Novell Inc. of Waltham is getting stronger.
[…]
Microsoft will resell the licenses to corporate users of Microsoft’s Windows operating system to help customers who want to run both Linux and Windows inside their data centers.
[…]
Microsoft executives alleged that Linux contained stolen Microsoft intellectual property. Linux supporters said the charge was intended to scare people away from switching from Microsoft Windows to Linux.
What the article does not state is that “interoperability” is just a cryptic code word for “software patents coupons”. Here is what Microsoft calls it:
“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
Darryl Taft at eWeek has covered this also, but he offers no criticism of this now-advanced anti-GNU/Linux collusion.
The collaboration is nothing but another attempt to stop Red Hat, Ubuntu and the rest of them, ensuring all of GNU/Linux is taxed and policed by Microsoft. Just watch what they do in China where software patents are not even legitimate [1, 2, 3, 4]. Here is a new and interesting comment from Linux Today:
The #1 Linux myth is: Microsoft is not trying to suppress Linux (especially desktop Linux)
That’s it. Eliminate the Microsoft influence and Linux takes off like a rocket.
Linux is already much better technology and it is getting stronger.
According to eWeek, FUD monger Susan Hauser added some further clues. Is says that “[a]lthough the companies announced the incremental investment on August 20, Hauser said the investments will not take effect until Nov. 1, 2008, and between now and then Microsoft and Novell will solicit customer input on various aspects of the effort.” Of course, PR purposes are part of this whole announcement. We’ll come to this in a moment.
Why don’t the reporters delve deeper into the issues? It’s just a shallow re-delivery of the message from this press release. It’s not an isolated example of poor reporting that either ignores or does not understand the issues. Here is an example from Linux.com, which covered the Microsoft-occupied Scalix last night.
Unless Scalix changes its pricing plan, I recommend reserving Scalix for small businesses with few users who wanted to try email and groupware solutions for Exchange capabilities.
Well, if a company has to compete not only by developing a rival to Microsoft but by also while paying per-unit royalties to Microsoft [1, 2], how can it compete? It’s part of a strategic pattern.
Had the article mentioned these problems, it would be clear why Scalix is pricey and one product to steer away from. Its agreement with Microsoft was its death knell. Scalix is owned by Xandros now and it’ also engaged in protocols licensing, i.e. software patents. It’s not free software.
The purpose of the latest step from Microsoft (and Novell) was probably to tie more companies to mythical software patents in GNU/Linux, but there’s more to it. It’’s also about the illusion that Microsoft is not anti-competitive. The Redmond press does not help here. This Kool-Aid for example:
Microsoft and Open Source: The Real Deal?
Sure looks like it, based on the company’s partnership with Novell.
The brainwash machine is hard at work.
The Boston Globe article also quotes Microsoft’s pay-to-say Al Gillen [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. Of course, just like the Microsoft-owned press (such as NBC), he praises and plays up this patent deal. It’s just like SCO in the ‘mainstream’ press (back in 2003).
“The Boston Globe article also quotes Microsoft’s pay-to-say Al Gillen.”Prepare for journalists and pundits to pretend that Microsoft plays nice with GNU/Linux. They will try to use that against the European Commission and other active regulators. They might actually buy it. But instead, regulators should be furious to see how Microsoft divides developers and forces them to pay (involuntarily, via Novell) after waves of extortion lacking any evidence whatsoever.
It is very serious trouble when the press does not give a voice to known opposition, despite knowing that it exists. Generally speaking about this subject, the press is largely just a marketing funnel for Microsoft (and Novell). Media inquiries for Boycott Novell do exist, but they are rare. There is no balance. Reporting is gravitated towards money and power, not justice or truth, which may explain the little exposure the Free Software Foundation (and GNU) receives compared to Linux (Foundation).
More details to will arrive shortly. █
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06.14.08
Posted in Microsoft, GNU/Linux, Novell, GPL, Asia, Ubuntu, xandros, Linspire, Turbolinux, Scalix at 5:42 am by Roy Schestowitz
Xandros from the east coast, Linspire from the west coast and Turbolinux from the far east, all of which sold out to the Beast
Xandros
The media has begun focusing a little less on the ASUS sub-notebooks as more and more Eee wannabes emerge and require reviewing.
In the past week, the appearance of Xandros in the press has actually been due to Scalix, which it had acquired last year.
Here is a new press release about Scalix.
Scalix, the award-winning Linux email, calendaring and messaging company, today announced the implementation of the first stage of a new, flexible, workgroup collaboration technology with a new ‘Proxy Folder’ feature in the latest 11.4 Scalix release.
Read the rest of this entry »
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06.02.08
Posted in Red Hat, Microsoft, GNU/Linux, Mono, GNOME, Ubuntu, xandros, Scalix at 9:34 pm by Roy Schestowitz
GNOME and Mono continue to be separable and it’s important to keep it that way. In practice, however, the two are often combined to form GNU/Linux distributions. Yes, unfortunately enough, Mono is also in Fedora. It’s in almost every modern distro with GNOME (if not all the popular ones). Here is the analysis of Ubuntu. We contacted Fedora’s leader and Mark Shuttleworth, from whom the Reply was this. They remain unconvinced and unalerted.
Another separability to consider is one that divides free GNU/Linux distributions from ones which Microsoft is milking through software patent deals.
Some time ago, Florian von Kurnatowski from Xandros (formerly of Scalix, which was acquired) said to us about Eee PC that there was “no impact or royalties to Redmond in this case, most of it open source, the stuff that’s not ours and Asus’ own development, and given the numbers this little thingy leaves the building in, actually one of the most successful end-user products based on open technology, ever.”
Despite all of this, Sam Varghese seems to insist otherwise. He believes that the Eee PC from ASUS is either affected by the deal or is somewhat of a timebomb (”Trojan horse” is what he calls it)..
Could the eeePC end up being Microsoft’s trojan horse?
[…]
In the excitement of the moment, everyone seems to have forgotten that Xandros is one of the companies that lined up meekly in June 2007 to sign a patent deal with Microsoft.
[…]
No, this kind of patent deal works through the fear factor. Once there is a sufficient large number of people using the software that is susceptible to the FUD factor, the company which has IP in the mix begins a campaign through issuing warnings of one kind or the other.
[…]
For the moment, the eeePC is free of insidious software like Mono and Silverlight, both the creations of the GNOME project co-founder Miguel de Icaza, and both posing susceptible to posing patent threats as they are both implementations of Microsoft technology.
Right now, there is no talk from the folk at Microsoft about any kind of patent threat. That kind of talk seems to have disappeared. But remember the deal with Xandros is a five-year affair - it runs till 2011. What happens after that?
There is some ongoing discussion in the #boycottnovell IRC channel (FreeNode) and some E-mail correspondence which could soon shed some more light (hopefully not Moonlight) on Mono. It’s now said to be believed, based on a reliable source, that Mono is even worse than Moonlight, which we wrote about last week.
Disclaimer: I like GNOME. I use it sometimes. I just don’t trust Mono (and yes, mainly because of Microsoft) █
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01.16.08
Posted in Boycott Novell, Microsoft, GNU/Linux, Deals, Ubuntu, Linspire, Mandriva, Turbolinux, Scalix at 10:00 am by Roy Schestowitz
Novell’s little sisters still making baby steps
Mandriva has already made it very clear that it would not sign a patent deal with Microsoft. It is curious to find though that Mandriva has just joined forces with Turbolinux, which had sold out and showed off its loveaffrair with Microsoft a couple of months ago.
The deal has no troublesome bits contained in the press release. It is a purely technical collaboration that has nothing at all to do with Microsoft technologies, so unlike Scalix, there should be no effect by association.
Turbolinux Noriko Otake, otake@turbolinux.co.jp or International Business Division, +81-3-5766-1142 ib@turbolinux.co.jp or Mandriva Vanessa Wall, +33-(0)1-40-41-97-29 vwall@mandriva.com Mandriva and Turbolinux announce a partnership by creating a lab named: Manbo-Labs. This Lab is the result of an agreement between Mandriva and Turbolinux to share resources and technology to release a common base system on each
of the Linux distributions.
Also in the news, the ‘bread and butter’ of Linspire, namely CNR, has progress to report.
Since the launch of CNR.com beta last month, over 20,000 new CNR users
have downloaded and installed the beta CNR Client. In addition, over
250,000 software programs, packages and libraries were downloaded and
installed at an 89.9% successful installation rate.
This seems like slow progress. The success of Linspire is still pretty much hinged on its ability to distinguish itself or even getting others dependent on its software. CNR is the company’s only real asset. As we were told by someone who knows the company pretty well, it is unlikely that Linspire will survive. Kevin Carmony made a horrible mistake before leaving the company, more latterly hopping on some dating Web site business while boasting and marketing himself as a “Linux CEO”. He seems to be flipping jobs nowadays, not only distros (he tried to become part of Ubuntu). █
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01.12.08
Posted in Boycott Novell, Formats, Microsoft, Apple, Novell, Patents, ISO, Samsung, xandros, Linspire, Turbolinux, Scalix, OSI, Kyocera Mita at 1:29 am by Roy Schestowitz
Wired Magazine contains a nice new item in its blog. It talks about attempts to assimilate and become part of the “open everything” movement for personal gains and without any true openness. Microsoft, unsurprisingly, is listed as an excellent example (more information in the links at the bottom).
1. Joining an ‘Openness’ Consortium…
2. Creating an Arbitrarily Open Standard…
3. Rebranding Existing Features…
4. Buying Into (and Locking Up) an Existing Open Standard
Big businesses are great at jumping on bandwagons. But even when they chase a revolutionary idea like openness, it’s only a matter of time before it’s back to business as usual. Take for instance Microsoft’s foray into Linux territory. The software giant wet its beak in the open source movement by partnering with Novell to distribute its own version of the operating system. But after briefly playing nice, Redmond went on a saber rattling campaign claiming that Linux violates 235 of its patents. Guess who Microsoft granted amnesty from its would-be legal assault? That’s right — Linux users who had bought into Microsoft’s version of “openness”.
Novell, Scaled & Xandros, Linspire, Turobolinux, Samsung, Kyocera Mita, Fuji Xerox, LG, the OSI, Corel, ISO, Apache, Zend, XenSource (Citrix), CIsco and Apple ought to pay attention to the text above.█
Related posts:
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01.10.08
Posted in Microsoft, GNU/Linux, Novell, Patents, Interoperability, Protocol, Mail, xandros, Linspire, Scalix at 11:03 pm by Roy Schestowitz
“The essence of a competitive market is its impersonal character. No one participant can determine the terms on which other participants shall have access to goods or jobs. All takes prices as given by the market and no individual can by himself have more than a negligible influence on price though all participants together determine price by the combined effect of their separate actions.”
–Milton Friedman in “Capitalism and Freedom”
For those of us who love proprietary software that is built by exploiting free software developers, a new product has just arrived. As you are probably aware by now, Xandros acquired Scalix and soon afterwards, just as we predicted, Scalix became the victim of a Microsoft taxation scam. A few months go by and Xandros reveals another clone of a Microsoft product, for which Microsoft gets paid.
Scalix is an open source mail server based on OpenMail, which runs on Linux servers, and uses e-mail standards such as POP, IMAP, SMTP, MIME and works with any standard Lightweight Directory Access Protocol directory.
Sadly enough:
- It is proprietary;
- It uses non-standard protocols (industry standards which Microsoft kindly ‘extended’); and
- The company licenses protocols from Microsoft (i.e. awards Microsoft for its objection to standards).
In simpler terms, here were have a proprietary software product which is only built upon open source technology and uses (also pays for) Microsoft protocols.
“In simpler terms, here were have a proprietary software product which is only built upon open source technology and uses (also pays for) Microsoft protocols.”For the same reasons, as ‘taxation’ above shows, there is a good reason to avoid OOXML and Silverlight, ensuring that they never become widespread. All these technologies present the same issue and are a reflection of the very same strategy which is to subvert the nature of GNU/Linux — making it something that Microsoft can more easily defeat.
In the title we have once again used a tactless term (”Ballnux”), but we do try to stress a point. It’s the point that attempts are made by Microsoft to make Linux users pay Microsoft. What for? for Linux. It’s a sheer case of abuse because no patents have ever been shown. Having a generic/encompassing/umbrella/ term to describe products to avoid is needed and “Ballnux” was a good suggestion that came from a reader.
We apologise for using a strong word, but mentioning products like the Koobox (Linspire), Wizpy (Turbolinux), and Eee PC (Xandros) is just hard without issuing some sort of warning. █
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12.06.07
Posted in Microsoft, GNU/Linux, Novell, Patents, GPL, Scalix at 12:34 pm by Roy Schestowitz
We mentioned Centeris earlier , the context being the GPLv3, which was needed due to compatibility issues with Samba. One curious thing about Centeris shows up in this newer IDG article.
Open, which will be licensed under GPL and LGPL, will ship with the next versions of Red Hat and Ubuntu, according to company officials. A deal with Novell is in the works.
Will this deal resemble the Dell deal? Will this involve software patents and royalties by any chance? Sometimes, companies enter the patent liability mess by association, by liaising with a Microsoft partner rather than Microsoft directly. We saw that with Scalix. There’s also the role of GPL proxies. It’s a role that Novell in particular has been happy to fill. █
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10.06.07
Posted in Red Hat, Microsoft, Novell, Servers, Intellectual Property, Patents, Antitrust, Interoperability, Virtualization, Xen, xandros, Linspire, Scalix at 1:27 pm by Roy Schestowitz
All roads lead to Microsoft
“Scalix has just released a new Linux-based product, but remind yourselves that this product brings revenue to Microsoft.”
What does a monopolist do when it finds a competitor which beats it on price and/or quality? It has several attractive options: it buys it, has its partners buy it (essentially avoiding antitrust scrutiny through proxies), or identifies new ways to extract revenue from that competitor. XenSource might be a fine example because it was ‘hijacked’ using the Citrix partner, but another one is Scalix, which was ‘hijacked’ using the Xandros partner. In both cases, Microsoft was able to use cashflow to change industry dynamics.
To avoid repeating this story, follow the hyperlinks and consider what is aptly named a sockpuppet strategy. Scalix now pays ‘communication tax’ to Microsoft, having just been acquired. There are similar examples, some of which involve the relationships between VMWare, Citrix, Xen, Novell, and Microsoft. Also consider those that are punished, such as Red Hat. This is punishment by design. It’s intended to start a domino effect that pressures Linux vendors.
Scalix has just released a new Linux-based product, but remind yourselves that this product brings revenue to Microsoft.
Linux calendaring and messaging company Scalix announced Oct. 4 the release of a new version of its flagship e-mail and calendaring program, Scalix 11.2.
While Xandros, Scalix’s parent company, has gotten buddy-buddy with Microsoft and even licensed the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol and the Outlook Exchange Transport Protocol, the company is still targeting Microsoft Exchange’s customers.
Be aware and understand of what Microsoft strives to achieve here. It wants to make revenue no matter whose product you buy. It wishes to have revenue streams that are akin to what telecoms and the rail system had enjoyed before things were changed through breaking apart, in order to revive competition.
Microsoft’s goal is to overwhelm and posses the rivals. Microsoft has already achieved this type of goal with Linspire and Novell and it is a classic monopoly abuse case that goes unnoticed. The FTC either looks away or prefers to permit this complex relationship to evolve, so an investigation is required here. While we’re at it, have a look at this new paper about Microsoft’s abuses. It comes from the American Antitrust Institute.
Harry First, NYU School of Law professor and AAI Advisory Board member, discusses the CFI’s decision in Microsoft in “Strong Spine, Weak Underbelly: The CFI Microsoft Decision.”
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« Previous entries ·
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.