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I have done several bug reports to Novell in the past and never had to give my Credit Card number. They asked for my name and address sometimes, so they could send me something as a present.

Mind you: I never called them. I just logged the bug report. Because not many people speak ASCII so they won't understand the logfile I am sending them doing Modem noises.

It was also pretty easy to follow up and do a ping if nothing happened. Even had contact with their legal department concerning trademarks and some stuff they asked me not to talk about as well as feature requests.

I had better results than the average Open Source projects.

My idea is that if you are doing bug reporting over the phone, you are doing it wrong. Oh, here is the link: https://bugzilla.novell.com/in...

A false positive implies that Google is wrong. Google is not wrong this case. Vortex.com is just not keeping its identity secure. Any email you receive from that domain should automatically be treated as suspect because it could have been sent by anyone.

I may not be able to send email directly from vortex.com because vortex.com has an SPF record, so at least, they secured that much, but anyone can easily forge an email header with the vortex.com domain name because they didn't bother to implement DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

Nevada's were found to be strong enough to control the use of the word engineer in any circumstance when the state went after Novel Certified Engineers.

Do you mean the case where Novel won? Because the only case law I could find was one where Nevada's Board of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors conceded they had no authority to limit the use of the word engineer as used by Novell Certified Engineers. The board even had to pay Novell damages as part of their settlement.

Try Filr from Novell. It's pretty amazing. It won't solve the dynamic DNS issues but it does allow access to your data and uses the ACLs you set on your server. It's likely overkill for one person but it works well for my small company.
http://www.novell.com/products...

No doubt Mavericks improves upon at least a few things, but there are definite problems with it. I hit the ARP issue (http://www.macstadium.com/blog/osx-10-9-mavericks-bugs/), which made the application I was using (VMWare View) unusable.

So Apple's "bug" is to do what others have been doing for ages? Take this 8 year old bug report - and weep for the bug fix is actually what Apple supposedly does wrong now.

If a dynamic ARP entry expires at the Cisco router, the router will not broadcast its ARP request again, but, for efficiency purposes, it will unicast the ARP request to the Ethernet address mapped to the IP address in the expiring ARP entry. When this Ethernet address is of a secondary interface in the Load Balancing interface group of the Netware host, the Netware host will not respond to the ARP request. This behaviour of the NetWare ARP implementation is not consistent with the standard (see ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/std/std37.txt), but, if it would reply, the Cisco router would always forward IP datagrams to the same interface, which defeats the purpose of inbound Load Balancing.

fix
CISCO IOS version 12.1.20 will delete the former dynamic ARP entry and broadcast the ARP request after it timed out on waiting for the reply to the unicasted ARP request.

It is hard to certify some program is trouble-free - that's arguably harder than solving the halting-problem- since you aren't provided the full inputs and code (the program might download additional code).

So I proposed something like this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/156693
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=308760

Trusted parties ( including 3rd parties) could sign the app and its sandbox.

My proposal is a bit like working around the halting problem by forcibly limiting how long the program will run. ;)

Impressive. You are wrong on just about *everything* you wrote:

>>POWER support is dead on all enterprise Linux distributions, Red Hat dropped support with EL5.
Nope and nope and nope

>>Furthermore OpenPower boxes are contractually prohibited from running AIX.
You are confusing this announcement with a previous attempt at the Linux market that was also called OpenPower. Those systems only ran Linux and could not run AIX. This announcement is about opening up the entire platform and licencing out parts or whole cores of the actual high end chips to companies like Google, who recognize that the single most expensive component in servers is the CPU - and they want choice and customization.

>>You've got a box of hardware with nothing to run on it and it can only deliver half the performance of comparatively priced Intel equipment.
The recently released Power7+ chip running Linux is the fastest thing on the market right now.

>> If you outsource support to IBM, their support specialists in the delivery centers will accidentally nuke your whole frame during routine maintenance, and you could be down for days
Umm..ok I'm stopping now

Try this: http://www.novell.com/products/filr/

He likely tunneled IPX-over-IP. I have also seen the opposite in use to connect IPX networks to the internet. Novell called it TCP/IPX. These setups didn't last too long though, eventually Novell gave up and switched to IP.

Novell asked people to send screen shots of their uptimes. http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/103.html The winner then had an uptime of about 6 years.

I've heard of a few doing it with pure open source but most of the ones I know who are windows server free are running Novell Open Enterprise Server (OES). It has a feature called Domain Services for Windows that emulates a DC. http://www.novell.com/products/openenterpriseserver/features/domain-services-windows.html OES is a set of services that run on top of Linux.

While your there check out http://www.novell.com/products/total-endpoint-management-suite/ it does far more than you can do with GPO.

I've heard of a few doing it with pure open source but most of the ones I know who are windows server free are running Novell Open Enterprise Server (OES). It has a feature called Domain Services for Windows that emulates a DC. http://www.novell.com/products/openenterpriseserver/features/domain-services-windows.html OES is a set of services that run on top of Linux.

While your there check out http://www.novell.com/products/total-endpoint-management-suite/ it does far more than you can do with GPO.

For something that's more completely considered a bug, check the long and sorry history of bug 108951. Only about 6 years old, but one of the more irritating ones. Sad to see such an issue bounced from distro to project to DE and back again, then finally closed because the feature it affects is removed.

https://www.suse.com/releasenotes/x86_64/SUSE-SLES/11-SP2/#fate-306585

http://www.novell.com/documentation/oes11/stor_posixvol_lx/?page=/documentation/oes11/stor_posixvol_lx/data/posixvol_new_oes11sp1.html

I think there is the possibility that they might be planning to replace NSS on Open Enterprise Server with BTRFS.

Check the bug tracker here: https://bugzilla.novell.com/buglist.cgi?&query_format=advanced&order=Importance&field0-0-0=op_sys&type0-0-0=substring&value0-0-0=openSUSE&resolution=---&product=openSUSE%2012.2&classification=openSUSE - Lots of critical and major bugs left that can leave you with an unusable system until you figure out the poblem and find the work-around for it.

Ah, was I not buzzword compliant? Were you referring specifically to LARGE businesses then? I suppose the forty to sixty percent year over year growth of Macs in business and government COULD be all due to small players. Forester thinks at least some of it is employees in bigger companies bringing their own Macs. And they also recommended more large businesses consider Macs. Regardless of what you think of Forrester, they are influential. More importantly, the report notes that the use of Macs in large businesses is small, it is growing. That is in direct conflict with your statement "nobody is going to move to Macs."

Linux... I guess you didn't note that the list I linked to includes one of the largest cities in the world, which has moved to using entirely Linux, for everything, including education and all government desktops? Or the US Army, which has adopted Linux for it's field devices?

According to a survey of senior execs, "nearly 50 percent expect to accelerate adoption of Linux on the desktop, especially for basic office functions, technical workstation users, and higher education/K-12." http://www.novell.com/news/press/2009/3/it-organizations-turn-to-linux-in-economic-downturn.html.

Windows still dominates large business desktops but there is a willingness to consider alternatives. And if Microsoft is going to insist on everyone learning a new interface that's going to remove a major barrier.

Yeah, the thing is the shells that have taken this form (since Windows 3.11) over the years usually were administer by someone else and presented you with the few options you were supposed to use.

At Ease

Novell Application Launcher

Tiotha

AOL Kids

iOS

Microsoft is probably planning to distribute Metro apps exclusively through their online store. So they are adopting the user interface used when controlling what the user may run. They do this for the money, let's not pretend there is any other reason.

I really hope apple keeps this option!

Those were patents. We're talking about the alleged copyrights on the APIs for C in the absurd hypothetical case that there is such a thing. It's not reported that CPTN Holdings got any copyrights that I know of. Do you have some such info?

I actually had one of these: http://developer.novell.com/yes/56439.htm (mine was a PIII-800 with 256MB of RAM, but otherwise the same)... It never had problems with heat, and actually still works (though the battery is long-dead, and I don't feel like spending the $$ to buy a new one)

I know you're making an example for effect, but lightweight powerful laptops that don't overheat have existed for a while. It wasn't that we had other priorities, it was that the power requirements of modern processors was outpacing the capabilities of battery technology. You get 16h of battery life out of your Asus by using a 2nd battery (the keyboard dock is 90% battery), and by using a very low power processor. If you remove the keyboard dock, you only get about 6h of battery life, according to Asus. :)

Case in point, my current laptop is a Dell Vostro V130n... I have taken it apart to service the hard drive, and the battery itself is not much bigger than a CD jewel case (thinner by about 1mm, but wider in one direction by about 3cm, about the same volume displacement). This is enough to power a dual core processor with a 13.3" LCD, 2GB of RAM, and a spinny platter hard drive for almost 3h. 10 years ago, the same capabilities in a battery would have been 3 or 4 times as large, and the system it drove would not have been anywhere near as powerful.

I think Linus is referring to this bug report in his rant:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=731812

If you haven't yet, try Novell's build of LibreOffice along with the "OpenOffice.OpenXML Translator 4.0" plugin for import/export of .docx etc. I've found it somewhat satisfactory. Caveats: Windows only, still on version 3.4, registration required for download.

(Not saying this is better than vanilla LO 3.5's .docx support, which I haven't tried yet.)

Groupwise. It works great at a fraction of the resources of Exchange.

http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise/

Google may have the largest networks, but I doubt they have the most complex networks. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to "scale out" as easily and quickly. I suspect most Google data centers are very similar in network topology and technologies used.

Old large organizations are the ones with weird complex networks which are not self-similar and use different network technologies. x.25 over tcp/ip, frame relay, netbios over tcp/ip, SDLC, token ring, FDDI, stuff that's still using Novell 802.3 ethernet frames ( http://support.novell.com/techcenter/articles/ana19930905.html ). If you're unlucky you'd need network equipment that can handle both the old stuff and ipv6 properly. The networks may not be connected to each other, but what if the old expensive equipment handling the "legacy network stuff" are also handling some IPv4 stuff?

Unless forced to I wouldn't bother upgrading an old bank to IPv6. Users inside can't connect directly to the outside world, unless they go through a proxy? That's a feature not a bug ;).

There's already a better paradigm on some phones. Basically the application declares upfront want sort of sandbox/permissions it needs to run. And if that is OK according to the system's settings, the OS will run the app while enforcing the sandbox.

Because the permissions are declared explicitly, it should be much easier for an "expert", or even someone with "common sense" to certify that the sandbox makes sense for the app, and maybe even digitally sign the app and its request.

So an organization (or "The Family Admin") can lock down a computer system so that only apps that request "safe sandbox templates" can run or install.

And the nerds like us, can set our systems up so that we can choose to run an app with a sandbox template of our choice (e.g. guest sandbox - looks like a new machine, no data about you available, no changes affect your "real system", once you're done with the program, it's gone).

I proposed something like this to Ubuntu and SuSE years ago: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/156693
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=308760

That said, people are still going to type in their passwords and send them to the wrong places- the sandbox stuff won't prevent it. I'm not sure of a good way to prevent this. Maybe the OS/browser could keep hashes of the user's passwords and if something typed matches a known password hash but might be sent to an unexpected site/context it can warn the user (are you sure you want to send your "Bank" password to Elbonia?"). Problem is some bank sites use fancy schemes for users to enter their passwords involving onscreen keyboards with some rearranged keys etc.

I really do wish they'd get around to implementing the Retargetable bit on assembly references though. In my opinion, it's the best way to support end-user replacement of LGPL components -- all dependencies of a signed assembly have to be signed as well, but if a dependency is Retargetable it permits any signature, not just the original one -- they can swap in their own component without a problem and you still don't have to give them your signing key.

It's also the best way to indicate that code is agnostic to the underlying CLR implementation -- make the mscorlib, System, etc. references Retargetable and it will bind to alternate implementations that don't use the same BCL signing keys, such as Compact Framework.

In defense

I'm sorry. In defense of what? I wasn't slagging Windows in the slightest, merely touting the benefits of software diversity. Do you not agree?

I know of someone in my Linux Users forum who had a whole rootkit...Novel SLED

Sounds like your friend needs to consume some text.Maybe he should have tried this.

Worse ClamAV only scans for Windows viruses

Why lie? What does that accomplish?
alan@alan-office:~$ sigtool --list-sigs | grep -i linux | sort
Backdoor.Linux.Small
Backdoor.Linux.Small-1
Backdoor.Linux.Suki.A
DDoS.Linux.Fork
DoS.Linux.Blitz
DoS.Linux.Chass
DoS.Linux.Forkbomb... and on and on. You have no credibility. Please don't bore me anymore.

In defense

I'm sorry. In defense of what? I wasn't slagging Windows in the slightest, merely touting the benefits of software diversity. Do you not agree?

I know of someone in my Linux Users forum who had a whole rootkit...Novel SLED

Sounds like your friend needs to consume some text.Maybe he should have tried this.

Worse ClamAV only scans for Windows viruses

Why lie? What does that accomplish?
alan@alan-office:~$ sigtool --list-sigs | grep -i linux | sort
Backdoor.Linux.Small
Backdoor.Linux.Small-1
Backdoor.Linux.Suki.A
DDoS.Linux.Fork
DoS.Linux.Blitz
DoS.Linux.Chass
DoS.Linux.Forkbomb... and on and on. You have no credibility. Please don't bore me anymore.

In UNIX-land, no it isn't.

Sorry, but shipping code beats standards based theory, and pretty much every *nix vendor ships dc with the OS.

Oracle (nee Sun) Solaris, IBM AIX, HP HP/UX, SGI IRIX, Apple MacOS X, SCO Openserver, SuSE Enterprise Linux (dc listed on bc page), FreeBSD, OpenBSD ...

You also appear to missed a few things about the Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7 / IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 standard - it is in essence a floor, not a ceiling - vendors can ship more tools if they care to. Also, the discussion on bc notes that some implementations of bc are built on top of dc, and that is OK, as long as the behavior of bc is correct.

It is worth noting that dc was one of the earliest programs to run in Unix, making it in while Unix was still written in assembly language. If for some reason it was to be not only omitted, but actually excluded by the standard, it would still be found in the vast majority of shipping systems for years to come until said vendor decided to migrate their Unix system to the current standard, a process that often takes years.

So yes, for the vast majority of people using Unix, an RPN calculator is often only as far away as a shell prompt.

Joe Doupnik, Hall of Famer.

Nobody worked harder to assist other people on the Novell mailing list. About as selfless and brilliant as anyone you will ever meet. And even wilder looking in person.

I looked into it, and it looks like it's partly fixed for Gecko 1.9.1 (which SeaMonkey 2.0 uses), and the real fix has been applied to Gecko 1.9.2. So we'll have to wait for SeaMonkey 2.1 or 3.0 (no idea what they're planning) before we can get an official release with the real fix.

Looks like OpenSUSE fixed it by making SeaMonkey use its internal Cairo library in the meantime.

While everyone here always focuses on what this means for Linux, Novell sells a number of products that have nothing per se to do with *nix like GroupWise and ZenWorks. Hell, there still may be existing patents that relate to NetWare.

Be advised that upgrading a running system with zypper dup with the installation DVD as the source will break the package manager halfway. I've spent a few hours sorting out the mess left by the upgrade from 11.3 (which is actually quite little) and it seems to work pretty well (most of the other problems were due to having too small a boot partition; make it 100 MB instead of 50 MB). Phonon is still failing to use my sound card, but I disable most of the KDE system sounds anyway.

Performance seems to have improved quite a bit in most applications and quite a few performance issues in the previous version have been fixed, so I'm liking 11.4 so far.

What's openSUSE's future look like? Since Novell is slowly dying, are we going to see openSUSE fade from being the #2 / #3 distro?

First of all I don't know if Novell is dying. Novell is Acquired by Attachmate Corporation.

Secondly the openSuSE community is very big and is operating on more or less independently from Novell.

Even if Novell would dying I think other companies would by the SuSE part with SLES. As SLES quality is also due to the openSuSE quality I don't think a owner of SLES would not support openSuSE.

I as a openSuSE packages still foresee a bright future for openSUSE and SLES also because the community around openSuSE is growing. And there are great projects within openSuSE like the openSUSE Build Service (Multi distro packaging framework), SUSE Studio (Build a custom distro), etc

Just fine? KDE 4.5 and 4.6 (upcoming) crash on log in with nvidias drivers ver 260.xx.xx (on openSUSE 11.3 32bit?). Many other applications and applets also crash, particularly on 4.6 where krunner, amarok and search and launch activity are amongst the affected ones. This is one of the currently most reported bugs at the moment with a current dup count of 58! As if all this wasn't enough in 4.6 the window manager also almost immediately freezes until desktop effects are automatically disabled.

So basically when you try KDE 4.6 on openSUSE 11.3 with updated nvidia drivers what happens is. You can't login due to desktop crash. If you fix that by removing the offending applets from the config files. On login Krunner crashes and keeps re-spawning and crashing. If you manage to kill it then desktop freezes and if all goes well effects are disabled. And if you get past then you can use it... without krunner, effects, and some of its best applications.

Given how sucky SUSE is a distro that is to be expected. I guess its suckiness is on purpose as part of the Novell / MIcrosoft partnership.

Just fine? KDE 4.5 and 4.6 (upcoming) crash on log in with nvidias drivers ver 260.xx.xx (on openSUSE 11.3 32bit?). Many other applications and applets also crash, particularly on 4.6 where krunner, amarok and search and launch activity are amongst the affected ones. This is one of the currently most reported bugs at the moment with a current dup count of 58! As if all this wasn't enough in 4.6 the window manager also almost immediately freezes until desktop effects are automatically disabled.

So basically when you try KDE 4.6 on openSUSE 11.3 with updated nvidia drivers what happens is. You can't login due to desktop crash. If you fix that by removing the offending applets from the config files. On login Krunner crashes and keeps re-spawning and crashing. If you manage to kill it then desktop freezes and if all goes well effects are disabled. And if you get past then you can use it... without krunner, effects, and some of its best applications.

I think you meant Novell Privileged User Manager

and not priviledged

There are a number of products available to do it..

One of the best is http://www.novell.com/priviledgedusermanager

There are some open source implementations as well.

Here is the MISSING LINK:

http://www.novell.com/company/ir/message.html

And this is still NOT GOOD.

Regardless of whether these are valid or not, and regardless of whether there even should be IP, trademark, or copyright... at this point in time this BS still exists and "The Unix Patents" that novell own[s|ed] need to be in the hands of FRIENDLY *NIX entities and most definitely NOT MS, EVER, PERIOD!

Turn them over to the EFF, OSF, or Linus himself, but this needs to be put to bed to kill off any more SCO Zombies in the future.

There are also needs to be disclosure on exactly what it is ms is getting.

Pretty obvious this is a way to kill off the WordPerfect litigation. But what else?

Oh... and Attachmate you STILL BLEW IT! Send monoboi packing! ! ! ! ! We don't want him or his disease! He desperately wants to work for ms, so grant his wish already.

So SUSE is still embargo'd and can't be used. Sad, really sad, for a once great distro.

It looks like this deal keeps NetWare customers going for sure and forces the SuSe business to pay for itself

Not sure what you mean exactly, but Novell's last Netware OS (Netware 6.5sp7) went out of support in March this year.

Novell Press Release: http://www.novell.com/news/press/novell-agrees-to-be-acquired-by-attachmate-corporation

I am still surprised that there is no popular "appliance" type server for this purpose: something that supports file, print, authentication, accounting, and phone system out of the box

There is (though popular is debatable), if you disregard your "phone system" requirement: IBM's Lotus Foundations. It's built with SuSE Studio, so you might be able to add install Asterisk on the same machine (depends on the support contract, I guess).

Go extra fancy and allow for painless mirroring and snapshot backups with a second (and third) unit if desired. It seems like at this point in time it shouldn't be that hard to do...

I suggest you look at Platespin Protect with Open Enterprise Server. For the hardware component, take a look at Platespin Forge.

I am still surprised that there is no popular "appliance" type server for this purpose: something that supports file, print, authentication, accounting, and phone system out of the box

There is (though popular is debatable), if you disregard your "phone system" requirement: IBM's Lotus Foundations. It's built with SuSE Studio, so you might be able to add install Asterisk on the same machine (depends on the support contract, I guess).

Go extra fancy and allow for painless mirroring and snapshot backups with a second (and third) unit if desired. It seems like at this point in time it shouldn't be that hard to do...

I suggest you look at Platespin Protect with Open Enterprise Server. For the hardware component, take a look at Platespin Forge.

Thanks, its nice to have a conversation about both the goods and bads of *NIX that doesn't devolve into an argument. I think it is easier to have an open mind if you use software pragmatically as opposed to zealously following one sect or the other. I see this time and time again with BSD vs. GPL licensing debates. GPL advocates often see BSD-licensed code as too easily stolen and BSD advocates see GPL-licensed code as "infectious" and too restrictive. The reality is that a developer needs to weigh the different licenses and decide if they want the code free for anyone to take or if they want others to be required to share changes back with them.

By the way, I took a look at the feature sets for qtparted and gparted. There are some screenshots on the respective web pages. I know (k)ubuntu keeps low-level system tools to a minimum, but I would be shocked if neither of these were in the default repositories. Gparted definitely is more feature-rich, but if you don't need any of the extra features I would try QTparted first. Gparted would likely require extra gnome libraries if you are in KDE.

Also, if you want or need to do offline partition management, I would recommend using the Parted Magic live CD.

Lastly, it looks like NDS is still alive and running in SUSE Enterprise Server, but under the name eDirectory. I am not familiar with it, so I do not know if it does as good a job as Group Policy in Active Directory at managing settings for tons of machines remotely. There is also no price listed, and I believe it is sold separately from SUSE Enterprise, so it may also lose out on a cost standpoint.

http://www.novell.com/prblogs/?p=2648

As far as I'm concerned, Novell stabbed the community in the back. I don't use Novell products and neither should you.

Funnily enough when Hovsepian took over as CEO in 2003 I remember him saying how much Novell would do for the Linux Community. Then a few years ago this Interview.

Lets look at what he did for the Linux Community and for the Developers he thinks are so great:

Novell Plans To Lay Off 20% Of Workforce

Novell offshores for cheap developement

Novell cuts SuSe Develpers

Suse Developer Layoffs

What did 11 break? It's broken nothing for me.

SLES 11 HAE is not some proprietary package. It's 100% OSS. It's made up of:
Pacemaker (http://www.clusterlabs.org/)
OpenAIS (http://www.openais.org/doku.php)
DRBD (http://www.drbd.org/)
OCFS2 (http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/)

You can get it here: http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=jC1wpkedb7A~

VMware tools DO work with the SLES 11 kernel. You can get them here:
http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/4.0latest/sles11/index.html

As for security, it adds selinux availability, TPM support, more locked down defaults and a YaST security module for easier configuration.

While it's anecdotal, I've never had a SLES 11 server lock up whereas due to hardware/driver bugs I've had SLES 10 SP2 lockup on new HP hardware plenty of times until we upgraded the kernel.

I think you got the whole FUD dilemma wrong. Or maybe I do.

The pattern with the HTC/Android case is the same as with the Novell situation. MS and HTC make a deal on whatever they think is beneficial to their businesses. In the light of the deal a MS-rep claims MS patents are being violated and they won't go after HTC or their customers.

These press releases leave an impression in people like me, that are evaluating the rollout of Linux and/or Android deployments, that if it's not being done with products being covered by an agreement like the above, MS is gonna come after them. Some now might be too scared of using Linux and either buy the MS-sanctioned products or go with something else entirely. I for one think, this is just saber-rattling; MS legal department doing the job of their marketing department. Microsoft is a company like every other. They have to report to their shareholders/owners and noone else (apart from legal entities). Since their agreement with Novell in 2006 they didn't do a thing to enforce their right they'd be entitled to. They could have made a fortune in court by suing commercial linux customers in the US or at least doing business with entities based in the US.

The reality is, that they didn't. It's 3 1/2 years and Microsoft didn't enforce their claims a single time. 2009 was a good year for them, but in 2008 they would defenitely have needed to make their shareholders a little happier than it did. I don't know why they didn't go after commercial linux customers, but a few scenarios come to my mind: a) Microsoft fears that after a first strike a patent war might evolve and they might face a confrontation with IBM. b) They make more money with their OSS partners than they ever thought was possible. c) Their patent claim is, apart from a few minor things like the double-click being implemented in the major window managers, nothing but FUD

Seeing how Canonical and Red Hat didn't buy in their initial claim and how Intel and Nokia are about to roll out their joint Linux stack without having an IP licence agreement with MS makes me opt for c). Also, patents are not secret. Everyone can find them in the US Patent and Trademark Office's database. Given that there's no report of anyone with more insight in the Linux code than I have has found a single case of infringement in ~40 months strengthens my claim.

The reality is, mind me not using caps lock, so far Microsoft's patent claim has been nothing but sabre rattling. The reality is that all of the companies that have made an IP licence agreement with Microsoft are all affiliated with them in one way or another. Alltogether their agreements rather look like a tactical positioning to me than to enforce violated IP.

The reality is, we all pay MS tax one way or another, but not because Torvalds and friends ignored MS' patent portfolio and, to quote you, bury their heads in the sand. We pay that tax, because MS seeks allies for a possible future IP war. We pay the MS tax to fund a strong lobby for stronger IP laws. We pay the MS tax, but only if we buy products and services from MS or their Allies. (on a 2nd thought we might better call them the Axis)

Hi, I suggest you go for the complete Novell Teaming package, its has exactly all the feature you request. IFolder lets you share documents across mac, linux and windows. Its very much like dropbox. And Teaming lets you collaborate with collegues and people on the outside (like alfresco and sharepoint but better for collaboration). And its opensource. Se this demo: http://www.novell.com/products/teaming/demo.html http://www.kablink.org/ The software is availeble on VMWARE images so you can have a demo running in no time!

Congrats NSA! Novell has been performing this miraculous feat of software wizardry for a few years now... http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/endpointsecuritymanagement/

Wonder who will do their bidding next?

NOVELL