Novell News

Today at the Enterprise 2.0 show in San Francisco, Novell announced the industry’s first real-time collaboration platform for the enterprise. Called Novell Pulse, it unites communication, authoring and social messaging tools so widely dispersed teams of people can easily share and edit documents, jointly browse websites, and have a rich digital conversation, all in real-time. Novell Pulse helps drive enterprise productivity and innovation by making it easier to communicate digitally, generate ideas and share information.

In additional, we also announced that Novell and Google are working together to enable Novell Pulse users and Google Wave users to seamlessly work together across both systems. Novell is the first collaboration provider to integrate with Google Wave.

The design point for Novell Pulse is the enterprise user, so we’ve placed a strong emphasis on features such as security and management controls. We’ve also drawn on our 20+ years experience in the enterprise collaboration space with products like GroupWise, and worked to address enterprise and business use cases.

Novell Pulse is a key component in Novell’s collaboration strategy and open collaboration architecture. A beta of Novell Pulse will be available early next year, with generally availability planned for mid -2010 in a cloud deployment and an on-premise version to follow later. In the meantime, check out some of the early press coverage in here, here and here.

To learn more about Novell Pulse check out our website, view the demo or register at the Enterprise 2.0 conference site to see the archived keynote address from Novell and Google.

This week the Los Angeles city council voted to move forward with a proposal to replace the City’s existing e-mail and productivity solutions with cloud-based e-mail, calendaring and document services from Google.

Like the LA Police department and others, we continue to doubt the economics and security of the City’s decision to move to a Google system. The City Council was presented with clear evidence that Google posed a very significant risk to the security of City and citizen data, much of it highly confidential. In addition, independent financial data showed that the new system will actually cost more, not less.

With the City facing a massive budget deficit, the speculated budget benefits of switching to this untested application are enticing, but as a recent independent Los Angeles City Administrative Officer report has stated, the proposed system under consideration will actually cost taxpayers an additional $1.5 million in the first year. There are significant costs to migrating, training and securing Google Apps.

To set the record straight, Novell GroupWise is a world-class product with more than 30 million users in 120 countries around the globe. Over 1,200 US agencies use the product, including 47 of the 50 US states. It is a secure, trusted and proven e-mail and collaboration solution. The latest version of GroupWise 8 includes interactive Web 2.0 dashboards, rich e-mail functionality and robust calendar management capabilities all delivered securely.

The City of Los Angeles should have opted for this proven product to ensure the security of its data and to save taxpayer money. They have taken a risk with no reward. However, as a valued customer, Novell will continue to offer our world-class support to the City of Los Angeles during the transition.

Today we launched our revamped and renamed Novell News blog.

Our old Open PR blog was originally conceived as a way to give voice to Novell’s views on open source software, Linux, and our mixed-source business model. Over time, the blog has become a much stronger information source for all of Novell, and increasingly a primary vehicle for breaking news. Hence, we’ve rechristened the blog to reflect its news agenda, and we’ve also given it greater prominence on our corporate website.

We’ve also made it much easier for more people inside Novell to contribute. In addition to PR posts, the Novell News blog will repost from the blogs of our CTO Jeff Jaffe and our CMO John Dragoon, as well as other company blogs. We’re very fortunate to have many world-renowned industry experts and thought-leaders on staff. Expect to hear many more voices on this blog.

This week there’s been several reports from Red Hat about their momentum and share in the Linux market. They’ve made some very specific claims that we have to correct.

First, to borrow an analogy from the old car rental business, we should acknowledge that in the Linux market Novell is definitely “Avis” to Red Hat’s “Hertz”: we’re in second place and we try harder. There’s no question about that.

It’s also true that when you look at the best independent data supplied by IDC, we’re growing and taking market share from Red Hat. In IDC’s latest report published this year, we grew at over 50 percent (measured by Worldwide Linux operating system new license shipments, subscriptions and maintenance revenues) and took 5 points in the market, while Red Hat shrunk by about 4 points.

In recent published news stories Red Hat claimed to have a “75% market share” in the paid Linux server market. Not true. According to IDC, they have about 62% of share. Novell has about 28 percent.

Another report from financial analysts at JP Morgan, citing Red Hat data, claimed that in the IBM System Z market for Linux on the mainframe Red Hat “has gone from zero share on System Z mainframes to 60 percent in the short time that it has had a product to offer for this platform.” Again, not true. According to Gartner, Novell has by far the largest market share which they estimate at 70 percent.

It would be nice if Red Hat set the record straight.

It’s good to have competition in any market, including markets for open source products. Customers benefit when there’s choice, and customers vote on the best suppliers with their wallets. We’re coming from second place, but if you look at the IDC data, customers like what we have to offer. New customers like GEICO, National Vision and the State of Montana. We’re also making it easier for channel partners and their customers to do business with Novell, which will accelerate our momentum. Stay tuned for more on this.

Back in August this year we launched SUSE Studio, a new product designed to make it very easy to build, test and deploy full-functional software appliances using Linux. SUSE Studio earned strong support from the ISV community and in the days following the launch new users were signing on at the astonishing rate of more than one a minute.

The response to SUSE Studio continues to exceed all our expectations. In the last few weeks we crossed another milestone – over half a million appliances have been downloaded from Studio (at the time of writing, we’re at 593,000 and counting). There’s clearly a big demand for tools that make it frictionless to mass customize Linux-based applications, allowing users to quickly and easily tailor software appliances to meet their specific requirements.

We’re already working with a number of large ISVs to support their appliance programs. Stay tuned for more news later this year.

Novell is carefully studying the decision of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. We are pleased that the decision affirmed the district court’s monetary award of approximately $3M from SCO to Novell. On other issues such as ownership of the UNIX copyrights, on which SCO’s claims against Novell, IBM, and Linux users depend, the Court remanded the case for trial. Precisely what will happen next in the lawsuit remains to be seen, especially in light of the pending SCO bankruptcy and the recent court decision to appoint a Chapter 11 Trustee to take over the business affairs of the company.

Novell intends to vigorously defend the case and the interests of its Linux customers and the greater open source community. We remain confident in the ultimate outcome of the dispute.

This week bankruptcy judge Kevin Gross made a number of important decisions regarding the ongoing SCO Group litigation. First, a Chapter 11 Trustee has been commissioned to take over the business affairs of the company. The judge also barred the SCO Group from selling its Unix system division, which was due to be taken over by a company called UnXis.

Novell is pleased with the Court’s ruling and the determination to have a Chapter 11 Trustee administer the SCO estate. Novell believes that the administration of the SCO estate by an independent Trustee will be in the best interests of all creditors and the estate. We also believe this is continuing good news for the open source community.

Today Microsoft made a major announcement that has surprised many in the open source world: it has submitted device driver code to the Linux Community under the the GNU General Public License (version 2). The drivers will be available to the Linux Community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. This is the first time Microsoft has made such a submission and is a radical departure from their previously expressed views on GPL.

Novell played a major role in making this happen. Novell Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman, who leads the Linux Kernel Device Driver project, approached Microsoft and helped guide them though the submission process. From his recent blog post:

There are two major aspects of what (Microsoft) did here:

They released the code under the GPLv2 and publicly stated that this is a valid license for companies to release code under. They will be continuing to contribute under this license, as they work to clean up the code, and add new features and fix bugs as time goes on. This is a huge step forward for Microsoft from what they have previously stated in the past.
They publicly stated that the proper license to release a Linux kernel driver is under the GPLv2, To quote from the notes they sent out to a number of press members:

Q: Why release the code?

A: Because we have utilized Linux code, Microsoft has an obligation to open source the device drivers. This is the process outlined by the Linux community.

Q: Why open source the code?

A: Because this is a requirement of the community, and critical in ensuring that as the Linux Kernel evolves, and as Hyper-V evolves, that the Hyper-V Linux Device Drivers evolve as well.

Under the umbrella of our 2006 partnership and agreement with Microsoft, Novell has worked hard to bridge the divide between Linux and Windows. The major impetus for the agreement was customer demands for interoperability, and our technical collaborations at our joint lab in Cambridge, MA have delivered solutions covering virtualization, management, document exchange – and device drivers. Today’s announcement is further vindication of our partnership and is great news for Linux, open source and especially for customers.

There’s been a lot of recent discussion about Mono, the open source implementation of the .Net framework, with some community members expressing concerns about the possible legal ramifications of deploying a technology rooted in the closed-source, Microsoft world.

To address these concerns Microsoft announced an extension to its “Community Promise” patent licensing to C# programs and Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), enabling open source usage of the technologies without fear of later patent claims. This protection covers open-source licensing models such as the LGPL or GPL. Peter Galli, Microsoft’s community manager, has more on this.

What does all this mean? The architect of Mono, Miguel de Icaza, responded to a number of press inquiries on this. For a sense of his views find below answers to a few common questions he’s received recently:

Q: There’s a lot of unease in the community. Do you think things like Microsoft’s “Community Promise” make a difference and make it easier to use Mono without fears around patents?

For pragmatists, it is another action from Microsoft in the right direction. Microsoft over the past few years has been making a lot of changes to adapt to the web, to open source and to distributed development.

They have open sourced very important pieces of code like IronPython, the Dynamic Language Runtime, IronRuby, the Managed Extension Framework, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET AJAX Client libraries, the Silverlight high-level controls, and the Silverlight control packs.

They also embraced XML for their office suite, opened up the specifications for the binary file format for office (both are enormous steps for achieving interoperability with their products), brought OOXML, XPS and their HD image file format for standardization and granting patent licenses for developers and users that implement and deploy those technologies.

All of these are positive trends, they have real impact in the quality of software being developed and they deserve more coverage than they currently get. Perhaps they get little coverage because they are aimed at developers, and not really at consumers.

But there is a sensationalism and tabloid like obsession with Microsoft that permeates some fringe groups, and for these there will never be anything that Microsoft can do.

Q: Why is this important? What difference will it make?

It will settle the disputes between folks that theorized that ECMA 334 and 335 were tainted and could not be used. At least the fear of patent infringement will be removed from the discussion, and we will be able to resume the discussion on technical grounds and actually focus on improving Linux, open source software and the .NET ecosystem.

Q: What’s else could Microsoft do?

There are a number of technologies that I would like to see covered by the Community Promise, like ADO.NET, ASP.NET and Windows.Forms. They are not mandatory for Linux as Linux applications do not really use them, but it would be nice to have them.

You can read more at Miguel’s blog.

Today Dell announced significant new additions to its enterprise portfolio with data center and virtualization services, new product configurations, and a new PowerEdge server and EqualLogic storage array. At the core of these announcements is a drive towards even greater performance and efficiency in the data center.

On the virtualization front, Dell announced two business-ready product configurations to simplify the design, procurement and deployment of virtual enterprise infrastructures. Critical to optimizing virtual environments is the ability to support mixed IT environments, enabling enterprises to easily manage, optimize and protect all workloads in the data center. To make this happen, Dell turned to Novell and Platespin Migrate.

With broad support for Windows and Linux, as well as leading server hardware and hypervisor technologies, Platespin Migrate enables enterprises to profile, move, copy and replicate data, applications and operating systems across infrastructure boundaries to make physical and virtual environments work as one. Dell will ship Platespin Migrate with Dell PowerEdge M-series blades and EqualLogic PS6000 iSCSI storage technology, making the move to virtualization easier, quicker and more efficient.