A fairly far-fetched hypothesis and a controversial opinion too is that Novell has already been sued by Microsoft over software patents, albeit by proxy [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. Be it true or not, we know what we know, but we probably will never know the truth — not for sure anyway. We just gather evidence and let others draw conclusions or at least consider probabilities. At the end of the day, likelihood can become compelling enough a factor to satisfy an observer’s thirst for answers and facilitate further connection of dots. In the Internet everyone works together.
Regardless of Microsoft, folks from Astrum (probably just one of them) have have been openly protesting for a while in the Boycott Novell site, using the comments section where they voice their complaint and share the message. We welcomed this because its showed that Novell was willing to betray its own partners.
A question to be begged for is this: if Novell, just like Microsoft, back-stabs its own close partners, what would ever prevent it from screwing codebase siblings like Ubuntu, Red Hat, Mandriva, Slackware, Debian and [apologies to all those who are left out]? In fact, Novell has already done that. It signed a deal which it knew was exclusionary. It took a direct shot at the likes of Red Hat, whom it was unable to defeat otherwise. It helped Microsoft in the process — and knowingly so! It jeopardised free software.
Mono advocates who read this site like to rave about Mono’s speed, power, etc. (avoiding all the key issues). They also rave about Moonlight, which Dana Blankenhorn recently compared to a pony in a horse race. Will you have a look at the Moonlight reference page at microsoft.com? Groklaw has taken a look and said last night: “You might want to read the Microsoft-Novell patent covenant for Moonlight, for example. Who can be sued? When? Under what circumstances?”
As such, there’s no reason to sympathise for/on Novell’s behalf at the sight of this news:
Novell slapped with suit for new mini-OS
Astrum Inc., a software security company in Carrollton, Texas, has filed suit against Novell Inc. Astrum claims that Novell violated its contract regarding development of the mini-operating system appliance that Novell launched last month. Novell’s JeOS or Just enough Operating System, is a miniature version of the SUSE Linux Enterprise OS, which was created to help independent software vendors develop or deploy new SUSE-based applications easier and faster.
Filed in U.S. District Court in Texas’ Eastern Division, the lawsuit contends that the two companies entered into a mutual nondisclosure agreement on Oct. 25, 2006, to develop the software appliance but Novell violated the agreement by revealing confidential information to partners and customers. Then, after the prototype was successfully tested in November 2007, Novell engaged rPath of Raleigh, N.C., the following April to create the appliances based on SUSE Linux Enterprise.
The suit alleged breach of contract, trade secret misappropriation, common law misappropriation, misappropriation of ideas and promissory “estoppel,” or broken promises.
Good luck, Astrum. If you need some unflattering information about Novell, please feel free to come by and ask. Novell has already pretty much admitted selfishness and it’s no better than Microsoft when it comes to exploiting partners. Ask Cisco. Revisit the big antitrust case. Grave minds [sic] think alike. █
”Microsoft’s conduct as a corporation and a manufacturer of computing products, is predicated upon an internal policy of deception, which includes deceiving customers, deceiving competitors, deceiving partners, deceiving its own vendors, and at some level, deceiving its own staff.“
Microsoft pushed its own proprietary LAN Manager and unroutable NBF protocol in the early 90’s. The strategy of the day among network software vendors was that if proprietary protocols could be maintained, then locks on entire corporations’ networks might also be maintained. When that strategy failed for Microsoft, it first reverse engineered Novell’s IPX (because Novell wouldn’t license the technology — it was part of their competitive DR-DOS), in order to allow Microsoft’s operating systems to interoperate with Novell Networks. Realizing that only strengthened Novell’s position, Microsoft ultimately championed the open standard TCP/IP protocol.
Novell’s role in this story aside, there is no mentioning of the BSD code. Credit blindly given to Microsoft? Need we also assume that Microsoft invented the word processor, the spreadsheet and the graphical user interface just because these were made widespread?
“Hey, Steve, just because you broke into Xerox’s store before I did and took the TV doesn’t mean I can’t go in later and steal the stereo.”
At the cheapest end of the new offering is the Teradata 550 SMP, which is a departmental data warehouse that has been developed to run a single application or support test and development workloads. The platform supports up to six terabytes of storage capacity, and operates on either Novell SUSE Linux or Windows.
The Teradata 2500 sits at the middle of the newly-announced range, and is priced at $134,000 per terabyte. The fully integrated, scalable platform sports dual-core Intel processors, enterprise-class storage, open Novell SUSE Linux 64-bit operating system, and the Teradata 12.0 database and utilities.
• The Utah Valley Entrepreneurs’ Forum; Omniture; the Open Source Technology Center at Novell; the Provo Business Development Corp.; Utah Science, Technology and Research; and the Utah Fund of Funds will host a free lecture series featuring speaker Josh Coates, who will discuss “Raising Capital: The Simple, Well-Understood Path.” Make sure that the projected numbers for your startup tech venture work on paper before launching that business. Aim for a realistic 60-70 percent gross margin with a $500,000 contingency buffer. And don’t put the task of raising capital before the operations of your business on your list of priorities. Time: 11:30 a.m.- 1:30 p.m. Location: Mountain View room, Novell Cafeteria, 1800 S. Novell Place, Provo. Please purchase your own lunch at the Novell cafeteria prior to these events. Contact Linda at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or at (801) 705-9303 to reserve your place.
Of course, “wow” can mean a lot of different things. In this case, it seemed to translate to something like, “It’s funny, but whoa. Where in the world did this come from? And how on earth did you get the CEO of Novell and these other people to play along by asking for advice in these video clips?”
It was a big day for many teachers and students; listening to experts from Microsoft, Novell, and Certiport about industry insights.
Watch Novell’s and Microsoft’s relationship in this new press release.
WS-Management Has Been Ratified as a Final Standard Based on Implementation Experience
[…]
“A key piece of the technical collaboration agreement between Microsoft and Novell is to support the DMTF’s WS-Management as a standards-based, interoperable protocol that leverages the web to manage desktops, servers and virtualized environments across distributed infrastructures,” said Eric Anderson, vice president of engineering at Novell. “Novell is committed to bringing open source and open standards together to provide system management interoperability across mixed IT environments, which will ultimately help to reduce the cost and complexity of IT management.”
In a fear-inspiring piece from CIO Magazine you could see Novell mentioned only in a semi-flattering context.
Novell and Sun for example, are working to re-explain and emphasize to the press and customers that they “get” virtualization. When you think virtualization, you probably think one name: VMware. (Did IBM pop into your mind? I didn’t think so.) The bigs other than VMware find themselves having to work hard to win your virtual affection.
And here is the announcement about Novell and Microsoft working together in this area.
Novell to work with Microsoft to build upon technical collaboration agreement and develop advanced management solutions based on open source and industry standards
Jacqueline Emigh, who covers Novell frequently, showed the readers of Beta News how Novell is praising Microsoft.
In another expansion to their 18-month-old interoperability agreement, Microsoft and Novell introduced software tools designed to let systems administrators monitor Linux, Unix, and Windows servers from within Windows.
[…]
“This is a great milestone,” Wagner told BetaNews. “I really applaud Microsoft for joining the open source community.”
Of course, Microsoft will not be reinventing IT management by taking these steps. But it will improve its reputation in data centers. It will take Microsoft some time to catch up with CA, HP, Tivoli, and the rest when it comes to heterogeneity.
– Microsoft this week set its sites on becoming a dominant enterprise management vendor, but experts and users say first it will have to define the scope of its goals, improve the platform, and prove it can be the caretaker of non-Windows systems.
The company laid out its plans this week at its annual Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) for a cross-platform enterprise data-center management infrastructure that includes hooks into Linux and Unix systems.
“Novell is pleased to be part of this alliance with IBM and others to help customers better manage data complexity along with operational, energy and cost efficiencies, which is precisely the value proposition around SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and virtualization in the data center,” said Carlos Montero-Luque, vice president of product management for Open Platform Solutions at Novell. “Novell is committed to green computing, virtualization, security and data center management, all priorities of the new program.”
IBM has pulled in technology notables, including Brocade and Citrix, as well as Emulex, Eaton, Juniper Networks, Novell, RedHat, Sun and VMware. Participating vendors will gain increased exposure to potentially new clients, and benefit from joint go-to-market activities and joint-development projects a well as exposure to early interoperability development, according to IBM.
Making a bit of an exception here, this Saturday posting is about Linspire and Xandros in isolation. For those who are new to this Web site, posts which have “Do-No-Evil Saturday” prepended are an attempt to catch up with neutral/good news about companies which we keep track of.
The firm often likes to cast itself as the victim despite being manifestly ill-suited to the role
It’s a safe bet that if you ask the average PC user to name a well-known computing resource starting with “lin” they’d think of Second Life’s unit of currency, Linden Dollars. And, five years back, the same people would probably have said: “Oh, Lindows!”
That was when Lindows was a brand name that didn’t belong to Microsoft. It does today, but only after a long lawsuit that didn’t in fact go Microsoft’s way: the software giant had to pay what is now Linspire Inc $24m to settle the case and get the rights to the name. And this was a case that Microsoft initiated.
[…]
There is, of course, a marked difference between protecting a brand, and exerting monopoly power. Monopoly power involves telling the small PC builder that they have to pay Microsoft for a Windows licence on every PC they build, whether or not they install Windows on every PC, because those are Microsoft’s terms of business take it or leave it.
Linspire, Inc. developer of CNR.com, an easy-to-use, one-click digital software delivery service for desktop Linux software, and Virtual Bridges, Inc. developers of the award-winning Win4Lin Pro virtualization software, today announced the immediate availability of Win4Lin Pro Desktop 4.5 through CNR.com’s one-click Linux software delivery service. Available at a special introductory price of $34.99, Win4Lin Pro Desktop provides consumers, SMBs and enterprise customers an easy-to-use virtualization solution that allows Freespire 2.0, Linspire 6.0, Ubuntu 7.04 & 7.10 desktop Linux users to run Windows on Linux and assists in the complete migration process to desktop Linux.
With so many new distributions like PCLinuxOS, Linux Mint, and more established distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora stepping up on polish, and even since the community edition of Linspire is available, Freespire came out a while back, why buy Linspire?
Xandros, the leading provider of intuitive Linux solutions and mixed-environment management tools, and parent of Scalix, Inc., the leading e-mail server and solutions company, today announced the preview of the all new Xandros BridgeWays Management Console for Red Hat servers.
Low-Cost Turnkey Solution for Windows Deployment and Updates to Preview at CeBit in Hanover
There is a new review of Scalix here (now part of Xandros), but it’s interesting that none of the press releases above actually attracted the attention of journalists. Scalix and Novell’s Groupwise are listed in this article about E-mail server suites, but it’s hardly the article’s focus. █
The death of business method patents could be felt strongest in Silicon Valley, where a first step of many entrepreneurs is to retreat with lawyers to start patenting defensible business ideas. It could also affect patent acquisition firms such as Intellectual Ventures, a firm funded by major technology companies such Microsoft, Google, Intel, Apple and Nokia, that is aggressively accumulating patent portfolios.
More about this in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Business methods could start an avalanche.
Nokia is celebrating the fact that Qualcomm has, to date, failed to win a single case concerning GSM patents. “This is the second court to conclude that Qualcomm does not have relevant and valid GSM patents,” commented Nokia’s chief financial officer Rick Simonson. The US International Trade Commission (ITC) has already declared one of three Qualcomm patents to be invalid and rejected an appeal. Both actions concerned similar patents from the same family, as confirmed by Nokia.
Starhome, which provides roaming services and converged solutions, has revealed that it has been granted a patent in the US (No. 7 333 808) for it’s Intelligent Border Roaming technology. The patent is based on Starhome’s service node architecture for controlling and steering border roaming, which prevents home network subscribers from inadvertently registering to cross-border foreign networks with strong coverage.
To bust this overly broad patent, we need to find prior art that describes a product made before 1997 in this way. Take a look at the description and please forward it to anyone you know who might have special knowledge related to natural language processing. Prior Art can be submitted here.
Bessen’s presentation is titled “Patent Failure”. Bessen analyzes a broad range of evidence on the economic performance of the patent system. He finds that patents provide strong incentives for firms in a few industries, but for most firms today, patents actually discourage innovation because they fail to perform as well-defined property rights. This analysis provides a guide to policy reform.
And now, at last, there seems to be a path to profitability. A successful courtroom defense of its software patents laid the groundwork for what many analysts believe to be a coming period of exponential growth. In January, a federal appeals court upheld that digital recorders distributed by The Dish Network (owned by EchoStar (SATS)) infringed on several Tivo patents, including one that allows viewers to simultaneously view one show while watching another.
I’m totally tortured with agonizing over Microsoft’s Singularity. See, I have a standing moral obligation with myself as follows: If Microsoft ever released a purely Open-Source or Free Software system - as defined by the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, or common conventional wisdom - I have said (and will repeat here) that I would download it, try it out, review it, and possibly adopt it, to be treated no different from software from, for example, Red Hat Inc. or BSD.
But I’m poring over the license, and this seems like it doesn’t qualify. It seems to be proprietary with the extra feature of being able to see the source, and modify and redistribute it only in the interests of academic research, with the stipulation that:
* It allows no “activity which purpose is to procure a commercial gain to you or others.” Does blogging about it on a website with ads count? Does publishing an ebook hacking guide count?
* “That Microsoft is granted back, a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, and sub-licensable license to, for any purpose, reproduce, publicly perform or display, install, use, modify, distribute, make and have made, sell and transfer modifications to and/or derivative works of the Software source code or data that you provide to Microsoft through the CodePlex tool or otherwise make directly available to Microsoft.”
[…]
Seriously, it could just be the case that Microsoft really wants to do the right thing, but has no idea how to go about it. But common sense is telling me that that’s a thin defense. Microsoft has two licenses approved by the OSI (MS-Pl) and (MS-Rl); and it only takes a minute to research the Free Software Foundation’s philosophy.
Microsoft knows damned good and well what an open source license looks like. And I guess I can’t kid myself about that fact, as hard as I would like to.
“Open source” becomes more diluted than ever, thanks to Microsoft which benefits from this dilution. █
A fortnight ago we mentioned the scrutiny which Hewlett-Packard and Palamida had come under. Palamida is probably misunderstood by its critics, whereas the only real concern over H-P should its scale, which could push businesses like Black Duck or Palamida aside, i.e. gain at their expense.
Now, five years later, Palamida is still going strong… albeit under a cloud of increasing concern from the open source community.
The perception about Palamida, Black Duck, and now the community project FOSSology held by many in the community is that somehow these organizations cast a pall on open source software. By locating open source in their client’s IT infrastructure, they seem to be enabling the removal of such software.
It used to be there were only a couple of players in town who combed through software code, specifically looking for open source packages and licenses: Black Duck and Palamida. A year ago, we figured there was plenty of room for additional players…
Over the weekend we mentioned some seemingly-mysterious BSD-GPL hostilities, which are in some way similar to the love-hate relationship one finds when it comes to companies that track and inform about Free software. The GPL(v3)/FSF vs. Linus/Linux kernel hostility is another example. Much of it is to do with Tivo.
“This seems to be begging for unjustified separation.”One particular interview that is used to isolate and fracture the two sides has been titled with the statement from Stallman: “If you care about freedom, don’t follow Linus.” This seems to be begging for unjustified separation. Stallman talked about philosophy at the time, not the engineering of the excellent kernel. GNU and Linux get along just fine. The press just exaggerates things a little. And yes — the same goes for BSD-GPL flamewars that are fueled by outside factors.
If you follow open source, or at least this blog, you remember the debate around GPL and the ASP loophole. In a nutshell, companies using a trick to avoid returning changes to the code back to the community. The last chapter is that AGPL v3 (the GPL version that fixes the ASP loophole) was finalized in November, and we switched the Funambol project to it.
Shortly after its release, the momentum of AGPLV3 began with Funambol. There have been other noteworthy adoptions since then, e.g. [1, 2, 3]. █
The USPTO in its current state appears to be on the verge of collapse if the following news is anything to go by.
Rambus Inc., the designer of chips for Sony Corp.’s PlayStation video-game console, might collect royalties of as much as $10 billion, six times its market value, by winning a seven-year fight with Hynix Semiconductor Inc.
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a ruling by a lower court that Dish Network DVRs infringe upon TiVO’s patent on a ‘multimedia time warping system’. According to some analysts, this could not only make Dish liable for damages, it could force them to shut down their DVR service, harming their customers.
Of course, there’s probably lots of prior art on this, so it’s hard to believe this even got accepted. Until you see the actual patents, of course. I think this is meant to be covered by Konami’s US patent #6450888 dating from September 2002, although Calloway indicated US patent #6347998 from February 2002. In any case, both show what empty snow jobs patents are nowadays.
Software patents are like guns. They give a false sense of protection. █
You must realize that Novell’s wildly successful NetWare product of the late 1980’s and early 1990s was filling a void in the Microsoft eco-system…
[…]
VMware has it in its power to not let history repeat itself, but it’s a mighty mountain to climb!…
The purpose of this blog item may be too reduce confidence in VMWare, which will most likely resort to legal action at a later stage when Microsoft abuses its dominant poisiton (pay attention to the quote from Steve Ballmer). Has everyone forgotten Ballmer’s old remarks about Google being just a “house of cards”? And Android being just “some words on paper”? What about “I’m going to f***ckin bury that p*ssy” (referring to Eric Schmidt)? More recently he said that “Google reads your mail”. It was miserable attempt to create Google FUD. Here it is in video (thanks to Slated):
Is the Burton Group not even trying to conceal its love and obedience for Microsoft? Remember that previous post and very recent “love letter”? How about the Group’s dependence on Microsoft technologies? Who will the Burton Group attack next, on behalf of its beloved masters? That is just what today’s analysts are for.
Kay added that Microsoft might even be interested in acquiring Citrix. Microsoft and Citrix have a very longstanding partnership, which has seen Citrix make a tidy living out of providing terminal services to remote desktops over its own protocol, ICA. Were this to happen, the combination would present a huge competitor for VMware, although the US$6.4 billion market cap Citrix would be a big mouthful to swallow.
Whether we like it or not and whether it’s acknowledged in public or remains hidden, it is rather clear that many resources are invested in hurting VMWare and Red Hat, among other companies and emerging threats (to Microsoft), such as ODF and Google. It’s vital to ensure that none of this goes unnoticed and unreported. It’s a reality and it’s not far-fetched once you get the many dots connected. █
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him… The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.”
–Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1893
The last time we boasted a project whose choice was the GPLv3, it was SimCity. Other large projects include Funambol (AGPLv3) and SugarCRM (GPLv3). Here is another ground-breaking transition that is certainly going to have ripple effects. It might also instill confidence in the minds of some of who are still cautious and hesitant.
Trolltech CEO Haavard Nord announced today at the KDE developer conference that the company’s cross-platform open source Qt application development toolkit will be released under the GPL 3. This move, which comes shortly after the release of KDE 4.0 (watch for our review on Sunday night), will allow the open source desktop environment to adopt the new version of the GPL.
Also on the same subject, Free Software Magazine has an excellent new interview with Richard Stallman. Among the things that he says there with regards to Tivoization:
Companies making consumer electronics products want to impose DRM on us; they want to do this in programs that they receive as free software, then pass them on to us in such a way that we do not have the freedom to change them. So they invite us to allow our software to be tivoized, and offer us, as an inducement, that our software will be “more popular” if we cave in.
The only way to keep our freedom is to have the steadfastness to reject those tempting offers. We have to move to a license like GPL version 3 that will stop these tempters in their tracks.
With Qt’s new licence, courtesy of Trolltech whose business is on the incline, the future of GPLv3 is all about business, not against it. █
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. Learn more
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. Learn more
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. Learn more
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. Learn more
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. Learn more
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy. Learn more
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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.