Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 11 November 2009 07:09
Opinion and Analysis
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Three years have gone by since Novell sold out the entire free and open source software community by signing a patent indemnification deal with Microsoft.
Expectedly, the two firms got together on this august anniversary to
spin things as positively as possible. Facts, however, do not cast the partnership in a very good light.
It's a contradiction in terms to talk of companies co-operating in business ventures while, at the same time, litigating against each other.
Novell has a
case going against Microsoft pertaining to WordPerfect. If the glorious inter-company harmony, which a joint press release tries to paint, did exist, then that case would have been withdrawn.
That hasn't happened. It never will for Novell is basically sleeping with the enemy.
It's typical of the spin we've seen over the three years of the deal that the word "patent" does not once figure in the Novell press release. Then what the hell was this deal all about - peanuts? potatoes? pineapples? or persimmons?
Novell has an excellent GNU/Linux distribution - but that is due to the fact that SUSE was developed by geeks in Germany and only acquired by Novell in 2003. By that time, it was Europe's most widely-used distribution. It no longer has that distinction.
In other words, if people are taking to SUSE Linux, neither Novell nor Microsoft can take much credit for it.
Novell has produced technology like Moonlight, a clone of Microsoft's Silverlight, courtesy of its vice-president, Miguel de Icaza, who has morphed from a free software supporter into a Microsoft apologist. But this software obviously isn't ready for prime time; else why is Novell
continuing to use Flash, with which Moonlight competes, on its own website?
Novell can also take credit for continuing to fund the Mono project, which is an attempt to clone Microsoft's .NET development environment. As De Icaza puts it, Windows developers will start developing for Linux because of Mono. Sure. And I'll be the next president of Mexico, senor.
If things are going so swimmingly at Novell and the Microsoft pact is salvation from on high, then why were nearly four percent of staff at Novell
sacked recently? We haven't seen any sackings at Red Hat, have we? Both companies are operating in the same Linux space.
If the pact with Microsoft was to bring better times, why did Novell end fiscal 2007 with a
loss of $US44.4 million? A year later, it was still haemorrhaging - the
losses were $US8.7 million. And 2009 isn't looking so hot either.
The global financial crisis will be offered as an excuse I'm sure - but then what about Red Hat? We see better and better numbers from them each quarter.
Novell has never been the model of a well-managed firm. Netware, which helped it to dominate the PC networking market in the 1980s and early 90s, was not developed by Novell staff; three contractors, Dale Neibaur, Drew Major and Kyle Powell, who worked as a unit called Superset, were the creators.
This software was salvaged by venture capitalists after Novell, which was then known as Novell Data Systems, ran out of money.
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