novels

Novell officially released openSUSE 11.1 on Thursday, unleashing a torrent of new features like a Linux 2.6.27.7 kernel, improvements to YaST, and others.

While the new features are nice, it's the improved community development process in openSUSE 11.1 that I think signals the biggest change in SUSE, starting with an upgraded license to open up SUSE to more unfettered redistribution.

I caught up with openSUSE Linux community manager, Joe Brockmeier, who confirmed the importance of the revised license and focus on community development:

This release marks a major milestone for the contributor community. It'… Read more

Novell just announced that it is canceling its annual BrainShare conference, a place for customers and partners to gather for training and discussion around Novell technology. Citing the desire to cater to attendee cost considerations, Novell's vice president of marketing, John Dragoon, is shuttering a 20-year tradition, at least for 2009:

As many of you know, Novell has held BrainShare for more than 20 years, and it is a tradition we are proud of. I also know that our customers and partners always look forward to this conference.

Despite this, many of you have indicated that because of the … Read more

Markus Rex, formerly the chief technology officer of Suse and currently on leave from Novell, is back in the saddle as acting general manager and senior vice president of Novell's Open Platform Solutions business unit, reporting to Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe, as Novell announced Monday.

Rex had been on loan to the Linux Foundation as its CTO for the past year. He's a fervid community believer, someone who will help balance Novell's interest in driving Linux-based revenue with the need to rebuild its relations with the Linux community that soured on Novell in the wake of its patent deal with Microsoft.… Read more

As ever with Novell's earnings, there is good news and bad news. The bad news is that Novell's Workgroup plunged 6 percent to $92 million for the quarter compared to Q4 2007, coupled with a 26 percent decline in its services business. The two helped to drag Novell to a quarterly loss of $16 million, down from an $18 million loss in Q4 2007, and total revenue for the quarter at $243 million, $7 million less than Wall Street expected, as Reuters reports.

The good news? Everything but services and Workgroup rose, and significantly, resulting in an overall … Read more

Novell will announce its earnings tomorrow at 5 p.m. EST. Red Hat's will come later. From interaction with the two companies over the past few months, I expect both to have good earnings to report.

Will it matter?

Right now Wall Street doesn't seem to be rationally correlating stock price with company performance. It has been too punitive, pummeling stocks that either should have been rising or should have received only a mild "scolding."

Analysts are almost universally giving Novell's stock a price target in the $8 range, yet the company's stock currently trades for roughly half that. … Read more

Update: Response from Novell at the end of the original article.

Novell has been doing a lot of good things lately in its Linux business, but counting certified applications is apparently not one of them. Novell on Monday announced that it has taken the lead in certified applications vis-a-vis Red Hat, with more than 2,500.

This is great, but it's also insufficient. Red Hat announced way back in October 2007 that it had passed 3,000 certified applications, and currently has more than 3,400, according to a Red Hat PR representative.

In fact, I just ran a search of Red Hat's independent software vendors catalog and came up with 4,314 certified applications.

Now, it's possible that "more than 2,500" actually means "more than 4,314," but I suspect Novell just got its math wrong. Indeed, Novell's certified application list actually includes 2,549 applications, as of Monday.

I was a literature major, so perhaps my math is wrong. But I think this means that Red Hat has 1,765 more certified applications than Novell, which I believe means that it has a lot more than Novell. In most contests, having more points than the opposing team means you're leading, which would mean Red Hat remains the leader in certified Linux applications, not Novell.

Update: I asked Justin Steinman, vice president of Solution and Product Marketing for Novell, to comment and received the following:

In the press release, we state: "Based on publicly available information, SUSE Linux Enterprise 9 and 10 have the most certified software applications when compared to the latest releases of all other commercial Linux distributions." [Emphasis added]

We only analyzed data for the most recent editions of products. Specifically, SUSE Linux Enterprise 9 and 10. Most customers only care about what certified applications are supported by the the most up-to-date version of an operating system. … Read more

Though SCO still has the option to appeal, a federal district court judge Dale Kimball has now effectively written its death sentence in the form of a somewhat blistering final judgment (PDF), as Groklaw reports.

SCO, once the bane of the open-source world, is effectively dead. The company, which long ago stopped trying to make useful products and instead morphed into a boutique law firm, has seen its revenue slide into oblivion while Novell, which stood up to SCO and has now won in court, has seen its Linux revenue jump.

Lesson? You can only milk a weak intellectual property … Read more

Microsoft and Novell said Tuesday that they are nearly ready with a beta version of Moonlight--a Firefox add-on that allows Silverlight content to play on Linux PCs.

The software is being announced as the companies tout the second anniversary of their peace deal.

Work on Moonlight began in May 2007 and an alpha version was shown a month later. Novell's Miguel De Icaza, who is heading the Moonlight effort, said on his blog last week that the beta version should be out within days.

The move helps Microsoft in its effort to position Silverlight as a rival to … Read more

Den of Geek posted a story Monday detailing 75 comic-book-based movies that are currently in some form of production.

Look, I love a great comic book movie as much as the next guy, but for every Dark Knight or Iron Man, there are a few Ghost Riders, Constantines, and Incredible Hulks (although I personally liked the film).

If I had to pick one from the list to be most excited about, Akira would get that distinction. If you've ever read Katsushiro Otomo's orginal comic book with the same name, however, you'll know that no one film can … Read more