Slashdot Mirror
Novell to Release 20% of Their Employees?
sicariusdracus writes to tell us that Ron Hovsepian, the new president and COO of Novell may have his hands full in the near future. Ron has been tasked with getting the troubled business back on track which many have speculated could result in more than 20% of the 5,800 man workforce getting a pink slip (although Hovsepian suggests that may be an over exaggeration). Part of the restructuring will be announced with Novell's fourth-quarter financial results.
Novell didn't "trip over its Linux strategy". Novell's primary product, Netware, was dead when Microsoft finally incorporated equivalent functionality into Windows. That's what the company "tripped over". Novell was essentially dead before they started doing anything with Linux. I find it amazing that they have managed to stay so relevant and important, and their acquisitions of SuSE and their support of Mono look like excellent ideas.
There is no way that their move into Linux was ever going to keep them going at their past levels. That's neither surprising, nor is it Linux's fault. You can make a decent business out of FOSS, but it's not going to be a cash cow like Windows or the old Novell.
I frankly can't judge whether Novell is executing right with SuSE. But the quality of SuSE as a distribution has been consistently high, and they have a good shot at selling to businesses, in particular in the European markets. I hope they'll make it, alongside RedHat and a completely free Debian; we need more and smaller companies, not a few behemoths. And, to me, the Linux distributions strike a good balance between compatibility and diversity.
WTF?
Novell is a main contributor to Mono (very important to bring developers/applications to linux), Evolution (best Exchange alternative for linux), Beagle (best desktop search for linux), Hula, F-Spot, etc, all very important applications for linux that happen to be mostly built around gnome. And you suggest that they should abandon these apps and start working on KDE because you like it better and because some web site with kde screenshots happen to have more traffic that another one with similar name. I'm sorry but that's pure BS! Please stop trolling so bad because this is
I don't care about the desktop wars. I use both gnome and kde apps and the only thing that I care about is having great quality apps for linux.
I think there should be a law that no patent can be enforced against users of a standard, if the patent holder proposed adding infringing features to that standard without (a) making it clear their proposal includes patented technology and (b) announcing their intention to charge license fees for their technology. In that case, I'd be wholeheartedly behind mono.
.NET is an unlikely place for them to start sueing. If they wanted to hurt FOSS, they'd go after the Linux kernel or Apache.
That's what standards bodies like ECMA and ISO are for--they require specific procedures and disclosures when it comes to patents. Microsoft went through this, so we know they are committed to being compliant with ECMA and ISO regulations when it comes to patents and intellectual property. Sun chickened out when faced with this--they withdrew their standards body submissions over ECMA, ANSI, and ISO's requirements for disclosure and openness.
But I still worry about the possiblity of some of the technology being covered, either under a submarine patent (although I suppose at this late date this is extremely unlikely), or under a published patent where the applicability to the C# technology is not obvious to anybody but some devious Microsoft strategist. It may border on the paranoid now, but I can't help it. I know Microsoft is a brutal competitor, and I don't think they're beyond doing such a thing if they can get away with it.
The fact that there is a connection between Mono and Microsoft, however slight, doesn't make me happy either. But, in the end, what's the worst that's going to happen?
First of all, Microsoft can't claim willful infringement if people don't know about the patent, so there wouldn't be any penalties. And what damages are they going to claim? And damages are usually based on revenue, but who derives revenue from shipping Mono commercially?
If Microsoft were to assert a patent claim, people would work around it within a few weeks and the matter would be closed; it is implausible that any judge would even waste time looking at the matter after that.
Also, FOSS must be violating lots of Microsoft patents, at least on paper: the Linux kernel, Apache, Mozilla, etc. From a purely practical point of view, Microsoft must have done the calculation and decided that it simply isn't worth doing anything about it.
There are several so-called FOSS supporters that have licenses and intellectual property that constitutes a much bigger risk to the FOSS community than anything Microsoft has. Microsoft and Mono just isn't high on my list of worries.