Novell News

Novell Distinguished Engineer Dale Olds has posted an interesting item on his blog that describes a cross platform identity management demonstration at Novell’s recent BrainShare conference. The demo highlighted some emerging Internet identity systems technologies and recent work from the Bandit open source project. This is the sort of technology that could change the way people manage their Internet identities. I’d encourage you to check out Dale’s blog here.

If you’re looking for proof on how Novell’s security and systems management solutions are helping customers save time and money, look no further than our customer success stories.

One of our most recent successes is with the Gundersen Lutheran health system, a comprehensive healthcare network with 6,000 employees in 35 locations. Using a combination of Novell identity, security and systems management solutions, Gundersen Lutheran was able to reduce the time spent managing user identities by 90 percent and IT travel time and costs by 95 percent.

To read more about how Gundersen was able to achieve these substantial cost and time savings, go here.

It’s a few days late, but happy first birthday to the ODF Alliance. The Alliance was formed last March (Novell is a founding member) with the goal of encouraging the adoption of the ODF document format by governments and public sector organizations worldwide. In a press release put out on Tuesday, the Alliance highlighted some of the key developments on the ODF front over the last year. Lifting from the press release:

• 7 national governments have recommended ODF or open standards for document formats in legislation, policy statements or interoperability frameworks including Belgium, Brazil, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, and Norway.

• 4 regional governments have made, or are in the process of implementing, pro-ODF policy commitments, including Extremadura (Spain), Hong Kong (China), Massachusetts (USA), and Misiones (Argentina).

• More than 50 federal, state, and local bodies across the globe are using office applications that support ODF, including the India Election Commission, Finland’s Ministry of Justice, and the City of Vienna.

The Alliance also highlights ISO approval, accessibility enhancements, costs savings proof points, and application support as important gains for ODF over the last year.

Novell continues to be a big supporter of ODF and the OpenOffice.org project, and we ship OpenOffice with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. Congrats to the ODF Alliance on turning 1, and keep up the good work.

The Free Software Foundation has published today a third draft of the GPL3 license. The FSF had indicated leading up to this draft that it would be addressing some concerns it had with the Novell-Microsoft agreements in the draft. Here’s Novell’s position on the new draft:

• We will continue to distribute Linux. Nothing in this new draft of GPL3 inhibits Novell’s ability to include GPL3 technologies in SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, and other Novell open source offerings, now and in the future. This is good news for our customers.
• This is a draft for public comment. Novell is not going to offer a public interpretation on specific provisions of the draft at this time.
• We are firmly committed to continuing the partnership with Microsoft and, as we always have, fully complying with the terms of the licenses for the software that we ship, including software licensed under GPL3. If the final version of the GPL3 does potentially impact the agreement we have with Microsoft, we’ll address that with Microsoft.
• Novell has been and continues to be a strong supporter of free software and open source. We are significant contributors to a range of free software and open source projects, including kernel.org, openOffice.org, Mono, GNU projects, and more.

There’s a good interview between Miguel de Icaza and Andreas Proschofsky of the Austrian publication der Standard up on the web. In it, Miguel details current work on Mono, and where the project is headed. It’s a must read for folks interested in Mono, the Novell-sponsored open source project to develop software to run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows and Unix.

The Open Invention Network put out an announcement today that Oracle has become a new licensee. Open Invention Network is an intellectual property company that was formed in 2005 to promote Linux by using patents to create a collaborative environment. Open Invention Network acquires patents and makes them available royalty-free to any company, institution or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux System. Since its formation, OIN has accumulated over 100 strategic patents. Novell was one of the founding members of OIN, along with IBM, Philips, Sony and Red Hat. Novell was a leader in early support for OIN, purchasing the CommerceOne patents for $15.5 million in December 2004 and making them available under the OIN when the organization launched.

Oracle’s joining of OIN is nice validation of the approach taken by OIN. More information on OIN is available here.

In case you’re not already plugged in to them, check out new entries today on Novell’s CTO and CMO blogs.

CMO John Dragoon features Linux desktop news, highlighting CRN’s desktop bake-off that found SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop to be the best enterprise choice.

CTO Jeff Jaffe commemorates his blog’s anniversary by recapping the product and company strategy takeaways from last week’s BrainShare conference.

We got some cool news recently regarding our support center in Mumbai. It’s just achieved certification under the Service Capability and Performance (SCP) customer support standard. Our U.S. support facilities gained SCP certificaiton a couple of years back, and now our Indian facilities join them. SCP certification, managed by Services Strategy Corp., is a globally acknowledged seal of approval for company support capabilities.

This is nice validation of our ability to effectively support our Linux and management customers worldwide…

Guest blog entry from Justin Steinman, director of marketing for Linux and Open Platform Solutions.

Last week, in an interview with ITBusinessEdge, I gave a quote that said, “I do want to tell you that Novell is a significant financial contributor to the Free Software Foundation.” At the time I made this statement, I believed it to be true, based on information I had received from individuals inside Novell.

However, since that interview, I have learned that I made a mistake when making that claim. Peter Brown of the Free Software Foundation issued a public statement saying, “Novell last gave funds to the FSF in October 2005, when they donated $5K as part of FSF Corporate Patron program. Since their deal with Microsoft was announced we have not asked them to renew as a patron, nor would we. Novell is not ‘a significant financial contributor to the Free Software Foundation.’”

Further research inside Novell confirms that Peter Brown is correct and I spoke in error. I want to make it clear that I had no intention of making false claims or providing misinformation to the market. I simply said what I believed to be true. Now that I have learned my statement is not true, I want to correct that error.

Thus, I want to apologize to the Free Software Foundation and to the open source community for making this misrepresentation. I should have double-checked the accuracy of my information before speaking, and for that, I offer no excuse.

Novell values its membership in the open source community, and as a member of the marketing team at Novell, I appreciate the opportunity that I personally have to participate in open discussion with the community. Part of an open and intellectually honest discussion is to admit when you’re wrong and accept responsibility. That’s what I’m doing today, and I hope we can continue a fact-based and open conversation in the future.

We’ve just wrapped up day one of BrainShare.  All the news from the show, including video of the keynotes and an audio file of today’s press conference, is available on this virtual press room page.  We’ve got over 50 press in town from around the globe, almost half from Europe, and are doing multiple briefings across Novell’s range of products and services.  In addition to CEO Ron Hovsepian keynoting, Craig Mundie from Microsoft joined Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe on stage to talk about the Novell-Microsoft work on interoperability.  We also showed demos of Open Enterprise Server 2, with NetWare virtualized on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, as well as new desktop features, including a new SUSE Linux Enterprise thin client product.

We’ll do around 200 press briefings at the show, so look for coverage coming out of over the next few days and weeks.