Exploring the reality behind exclusionary deals with Microsoft and their subtle (yet severe) implications
Summary: A few bits and pieces about SLES, SLED, Novell’s performance, Xandros and Scalix
THERE WAS almost nothing about SLES and SLED in the past week’s news. Here is just a boring Novell attraction which was uploaded to YouTube some days ago, having been captured in Computex not so long ago.
Summary: Microsoft lock-in still enters GNU/Linux, with Novell’s sponsorship
A QUICK look at Planet SUSE always fascinates because decent proportions of the posts there are not about SUSE. But it’s not to do with people who write about banal things in life, either. It is about some people who are employed by Novell to advance .NET and — by inference — Windows as well.
Some of the posts in Planet SUSE are purely about Windows development, with some that combine Mono and Microsoft. For example:
In Visual Studio 2010 they added much better support for targeting multiple frameworks, allowing us to target .NET 2.0 and 4.0 from the same solution, which also gives us the ability to target runtime’s such as Mono.
The examples above are from this guy, whose interests are:
C#, ASP.NET, Mono, .NET
Open/SUSE seems to be losing its focus. A lot of .NET content reaches the project and more examples are not difficult to find.
The debugger integration in MonoDevelop is progressing, lots of work in the past weeks. I’m going to show what is supported right now, altough much work is still left to make everything stable.
Here is a new example of development of MonoDevelop for Windows. The problem is that most Windows developers will use the lesser version of Visual Studio, not MonoDevelop. Regardless of Novell’s intentions, this only promotes .NET. It helps Windows [1, 2, 3]. As Robert Pogson correctly points out:
“We do not need Mono or anything else connected to that other OS,” blogger Robert Pogson told LinuxInsider via email. “Developers love GNU/Linux, which is why they are migrating to it in droves.”
GNU/Linux was “designed and created by developers from all over the planet and over many decades, stemming from UNIX,” Pogson explained. “There is nothing wrong with Mono except that it gives M$ more power over GNU/Linux. Any corporation that threatens litigation over software patents should be avoided like the plague.”
As comments on the article above (titled “Is Linux Suffering From Mono?”), consider Rainer Weikusat who wrote:
In my opinion, .NET is a pretty typical example of ‘Microsoft designed APIs’: It is both weird (for instance, there is a ‘web client’ superclass which has ‘ftp client’ and ‘ http client’ subclasses) and hellishly complicated (at least one person whom I had to work together with during the last couple of months was literally incapable of using .NET CF to accomplish something as simple as transmitting a HTTP POST-request) and those students would be much better of with learning a few other languages and especially, with getting used to the terminology based on ‘the internet standards’ (ie the IETF RFCs) than to some Microsoft-only bastardization of them which only helps to ensure that nobody can talk to a ‘.NET-developer’ about these topics except another .NET-developer and that the .NET-developer will have at least some troubles trying to understand the actual specifications of the protocol he or she is expected to work with.
GreyGeek adds:
LinuxInsider leaving a pro MS slant. In this case, a pro MONO/.NET slant. Kevin Dean is the quoted source taking over for Jo Shields as the point person calling everyone who opposes MONO in Linux as “fanatics”, etc…
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In other words, Canonical CANNOT take Ubuntu commercial and still include MONO.
That last point is indeed a potential issue because “civil disobedience” would not work for a business, which is subjected to sanctions. Here is a person who is moving to Fedora because Fedora is removing Mono.
There’s a lot of hype/war on the “Mono issue” lately but I don’t want to get into all that. My opinion is, yet again, simple: nothing related to Microsoft, please. Microsoft proved themselves to be evil every step of the way. They don’t like free software, they don’t like people using free software, they don’t like companies that bundle their hardware with free software. All of these can be fine until they start bribing judges, pressuring governments (governments for crying out loud!), blackmailing OEM’s, using their licenses against every single computer user they can. We have seen a couple of their trojan horses of licenses (just a quick look at http://www.groklaw.net/ would suffice) which means we cannot and more importantly should not trust anything coming from Microsoft.
“Some people always blame mono,” says this bug report, but the point worth making is that there is no reason to lean on Microsoft. Java is the more mature software for those who require it. Microsoft is lagging in terms of programming, so to imitate it is just plainly absurd. To Novell, it is a matter of repaying Microsoft.
Even people from Microsoft don’t support what Microsoft does to programming. As Fewa showed us last night, there are testimonies too.
If you’ve ever used Microsoft Access or Excel, you have likely used a product that Mike Gunderloy had a hand in developing. The irony is that Gunderloy himself doesn’t use those products anymore. He’s given up Microsoft for open source — and he’s not going back.
Gunderloy, an Evansville, Ind.-based freelance developer for the past quarter century, goes way back with Microsoft. “I was never a full-time employee, but have several times been a contractor with a badge and [Redmond] campus access,” he says.
His contracting work — on the order of half a million dollars, Gunderloy estimates — led to a substantial amount of code contributed to the Access and Excel versions of Microsoft Office 97 and 2000. He’s also worked on other, more obscure parts of the Microsoft software empire, including SQL Server, C#, and ASP.Net.
Fewa explains:
He refused to “contribut[e] to the eventual death of programming.”[7] He states: “Microsoft itself represents a grave threat to the future of software development through its increasing inclination to stifle competition through legal shenanigans.”
Sounds like Mono. █
Summary: Novell is reportedly willing to sell parts of the company, but what about SUSE and UNIX?
NOVELL’S last BrainShare conference was one of Novell’s last hurrahs. As old photos remind us, Novell chose to go the dark side — so to speak — in order to buy itself some more time on the NASDAQ and perhaps in the market in general.
Novell may soon sell parts of its business [1, 2], but which ones? The one of most relevance to us is the SUSE component; as the rest is quite irrelevant to the patent deal with Microsoft, except for the units which make use of SUSE as the underlying operating system. According to yesterday’s article from Timothy at The Register, Novell’s SUSE component is still not profitable. To quote some fragments of interest from his analysis:
Commercial operating system distributor and software powerhouse wannabe Novell isn’t doing the credibility of its long-term business plan any favors by talking about selling part or all of the company to potential suitors.
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This was a pretty strong signal that Novell might be up for sale, after many years of rumors about the company possibly being acquired by IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and others. The signal was so strong that Novell’s shares rocketed up 10.1 per cent to $4.68 a pop, giving the company a market capitalization of $1.62bn. That’s one way to get the stock price to move.
But it is apparently not what Novell intended, and somewhere between Novell HQ and JP MorganChase, some wires got crossed. Because on Friday afternoon, Novell posted an 8-K form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that put the kibosh on the talk about a sale or spinout of specific units.
[...]
Maybe. Novell’s Linux business, as it admitted when it reported its second quarter of fiscal 2009 financials at the end of May, is still not profitable, even after $238m in Microsoft SUSE Linux coupon cash has been pumped into the company’s books over the past two years. There’s another $102m that can still be pumped in as Microsoft customers activate the remaining $27m in coupons from the original $240m agreement from November 2006, plus another $75m that came from a second coupon deal the two companies inked at the end of 2008.
Without that Microsoft funny money, Novell would have had to slash costs and payroll, and would not be able to show the decent growth it has attained with its Linux business. So in that regard, it was a smart move, even if it did invoke the ire of the open source community. But depending on Microsoft to help promote Linux is not a sustainable business model.
[...]
It seems that $1bn or $1.62bn are pretty decent valuations for Novell at this point, no matter how much Novell’s top brass might protest, and it also seems very unlikely that any company would shell out the $2.5bn to $3bn in cash it would take to buy Novell, unless that company thought it could remove substantial costs from Novell above and beyond what Novell has done itself.
As someone points out in the comments, there is danger that particular parts will be “bought by Microsoft.”
cuz then MS would own the UNIX source code.
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Another person remarks: “Novell may have a big chunk of cash from the MS coupons, but it isn’t clear how much business they lost by making their deal with MS.”
Novell may have rebutted the speculation that the business as a whole will be sold, but which parts of the company had negotiations going on for sale? Any at all? Here is what was inferred from a meeting with Novell’s CFO, Dana Russell:
DiFucci noted that he held meetings with Novell CFO Dana Russell yesterday. He writes that Russell “entertained the possibility of breaking out some parts or of selling the entire company in order to maximize shareholder value given the current depressed valuation levels.” DiFucci writes that, while Russell also asserted that management is making progress in unlocking some of the value of the company, the discussion about a possible break-up or sale “could signal the company’s willingness to be acquired.”
If Novell gets sold, Boycott Novell will stay. Boycott Novell has already outgrown the narrowing remit of Novell anyway. █
Summary: Novell and Microsoft a matter of national security, but whose?
THERE is an old slur about GNU/Linux being the operating system for “terrorists” (or something along those lines). Why does Microsoft get a free ride?
According to The Register, SLES 10 and Windows power some of Iran’s nuclear programs.
That second generation box, which has 16 dual-core and another 16 quad-core Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices, 98 GB of total memory, and 182 gigaflops of aggregate computing power, runs Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 as well as Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition.
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While ComputerWorld and Iran Watch, a group dedicated to the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons technology to Iran, made much of the AMD iron and didn’t say anything about the Novell and Microsoft software, the real worry is what application software Iran is able to get its hands on to do finite element analysis and fluid mechanics in the design of the rockets.
To use some sarcasm, did Iran buy its SLES coupons from Microsoft? For software patents, obviously? Novell and Microsoft could probably issue a press release to rave about this deployment and quote the army regarding the “interoperability” advantage or "peace of mind" they receive from these coupons. Now, if only they could be sold “peace”, too.
In other security news, Microsoft’s friend Finjan [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] is warning (again) about Windows botnets. From Heise:
Security services provider Finjan has released a report from its Malicious Code Research Center analysing a trading platform for botnets. According to the report, the underground trade in infected computers offers a comprehensive menu of botnets at locations all around the world. Some Far Eastern networks can be had for a mere $5 a thousand PCs.
Watch the role and effect of Windows malware in this process. From the BBC (days ago):
“This emerging threat is becoming very real and is already affecting millions and millions of websites. 30,000 web pages are affected every day according to the likes of Microsoft and the security firm Sophos,” said Mr Daswani who was a senior security engineer at Google.
Summary: Assorted news about GNU/Linux that funds Microsoft
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“Now [Novell is] little better than a branch of Microsoft”
–LinuxToday Managing Editor
Summary: Novell is poaching Free GNU/Linux users, not Windows users
NOVELL’S actions speak louder than its words, which are pretty clear too. Novell tries to replace GNU/Linux with Microsoft patent coupons and here is the latest evidence.
Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions is now a Novell Authorized Training Partner in North America. The move comes as Novell strives to migrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers to Novell SUSE Linux.
This article is about Novell trying to steal Red Hat customers rather than Microsoft customers. The methods are nasty. “People that use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to compensate us,” said Steve Ballmer. Since when is Mr. Ballmer Novell’s spokesperson? Prior to this remark he praised Novell. See the video at the bottom. █
Summary: Novell elevates Windows in datacentres, Xandros wants to live with Windows
IT HAS BEEN a long time since we last pointed out that Novell supports ActiveX, Windows Vista, Internet Explorer, .NET, and even XAML.
Novell’s relationship with Microsoft is simple. Like a relationship where the guy gets love and the woman gets his bank account, in the Novell/Microsoft relationship Novell is given some coupons and endorsement in exchange for GNU/Linux FUD like "IP peace of mind". Additionally, Microsoft advances its APIs with Novell’s help. The examples above include .NET and Silverlight, but there may be more, such as Active Directory. Novell markets this as a necessary bridge while Microsoft uses this to keep regulators away and attract GNU/Linux users to Windows (poaching). When the goal is merely to mimic Windows, then the outcome is naturally inferior for that who is mimicking.
As we wrote some days ago, both Xandros and Novell are giving Microsoft more control over GNU/Linux in the datacentre [1, 2]. Here is the next natural step.
Suse Linux and Windows will become more closely integrated next week, when Novell releases a product allowing Microsoft management tools to monitor the open source operating system.
Novell makes Microsoft the captain in the DC. In simple terms, Novell says that it will help develop a tool that makes GNU/Linux subordinate to Windows where GNU/Linux is already very dominant. Back in 2006 and 2007 Ron Hovsepian insisted that this was part of the arrangement all along. In exchange for cash infusions from Microsoft, Novell will ensure that Windows gains/keeps the upper hand in some areas.
As the article above states, what Novell now boasts are “joint sales of Linux support certificates.” This is just a sophisticated name for “patent protection”. It comes from Microsoft. It is granted only to clients of Novell, but Xandros too has a 'protection' programme. It is worth emphasising that Xandros is "kind of getting away from being a Linux company," to quote its product marketing manager. The company is also assuming that Linspire customers are Windows users whilst selling software that absolutely requires Windows. David at ITWire asks whether Xandros is now “a Microsoft stooge” just like Corel.
Xandros President Michael Bego told DesktopLinux.com that Xandros would announce at the coming LinuxWorld conference a complete desktop solution aimed specifically at low-powered PCs, making it “a practical solution for machines which have no hope of running resource-hungry Microsoft products.”
While such a statement proclaims a chief achievement of Linux, namely its ability to effectively and efficiently run modern software on low-powered hardware, it is surprising and telling by today’s standards that Bego did not also claim Xandros would be a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows on contemporary hardware.
It was not known then but Xandros was soon to become central to one of the greatest farces in Linux history, known as LindowsOS.
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These objectives are good and right. Yet, has Xandros gone too far, becoming a proprietary system of its own? Is Microsoft actually waging a war against Linux through cross-collaboration agreements by diluting the message of open source software and software freedom?
Hence the purpose of Boycott Novell. █
Summary: News about SUSE
There is nothing significant to see here this time around, but SUSE was mentioned in some places, mostly indirectly. Heise, for example, mentioned SUSE/Novell in this short roundup
