Novell News

The Free Software Foundation today released the final version of the new GNU General Public License, GPLv3. Novell welcomes and supports GPLv3 and we appreciate the collaborative process that led to its conclusion.

With the final release of GPLv3, we re-affirm Novell’s ability to include technologies licensed under GPLv2 or GPLv3 in SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, and other Novell offerings and to deliver these technologies to our customers. We note that the language which grandfathered the Novell-Microsoft agreement from a key patent provision remains in the final version. All of this is good news for our customers who will continue to enjoy using the best engineered and most interoperable platform for mission-critical computing.

The terms of the final version of GPLv3 will allow our continued collaboration with Microsoft. We remain committed to that partnership, which we believe will help grow the Linux market and satisfy long-standing customer needs for interoperability in a mixed-source world. We look forward to providing the fruits of this to our customers and our fellow community members in accord with our previously outlined roadmap.

Staybridge Suites is the extended-stay brand of the InterContinental Hotels Group, and Staybridge Suites Hotel of Tallahassee is one of the first hotels to offer thin-client workstations in all of its 104 rooms.

Hotels are often remote “offices” for guests, and hotels want to provide quality technology services. Staybridge Suites selected virtual desktops delivered with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop thin clients as a way to provide guests with a desktop in every room, ensuring each guest’s privacy and security. The hotel evaluated traditional PCs but found them to be more costly as well as time consuming to manage. With thin clients, it could provide guests with a “clean-slate” desktop at every check-in without the need to sanitize the system for the guest upon check-out.

See more of the story here.

Yesterday, Novell’s federal data center strategist, Jose Betancourt, and IDC Government Insights global research practice director, Thom Rubel, shared insights and best practices on how to reduce cost, space, and power consumption in government data centers.

The Webinar, “The Government Lean Data Center,” addressed the conflicting priorities government IT decision makers are faced with – ensuring safety of the homeland and citizens’ privacy; protecting information assets and allowing information sharing; driving down costs and improving services to citizens. Juggling these duties while keeping an eye on spending is a huge undertaking. Adopting a lean data center can help. It reduces wasted server capacity, power costs, license and maintenance costs, and optimizes floor space.

To view the Webinar, click here.

It’s a busy week for Novell at this year’s Burton Group Catalyst Conference taking place in San Francisco. First we announced the availability of the DigitalMe identity selector, an open source, cross-platform information card selector that helps users manage digital identity cards used in Web transactions. We also announced Novell ZENworks Endpoint Security Management, a solution to help organizations enforce security policies that control device ports, wireless connections and applications, as well as guarantees data encryption.

We were also involved in two other announcements at the event: Sailpoint is integrating Compliance IQ with Novell Identity Manager and Sentinel from Novell, allowing enterprises to automate and streamline compliance processes and significantly reduce business risk. Sxip Identity is supporting information cards, including DigitalMe, with Sxip Access, thus enabling remote users to employ phishing-resistant identity agents to authenticate to Salesforce and Google Apps with user-centric, Identity 2.0 technologies.

Additionally, our open source identity Bandit Project team is participating in a user-centric identity management interoperability demonstration to prove that disparate identity management systems can interoperate to serve consumers and enterprise application needs.

Other activites at Catalyst include the “Get Smart with Novell” hospitality suite, where attendees can speak with Novell experts and see demonstrations of our identity, security and resource management solutions, as well as enter hourly drawings for a chance to win some cool prizes. We are also well represented on several conference panel discussions: one on identity interoperability, another on identity services, and the last one on defending a perpetually vulnerable software base.

Novell CTO for Compliance Solutions, Reed Harrison, was at the Interop conference in late May. He talked to Interop TV about ZENworks (our ZENworks Linux Management solution won Best of Interop in the Management, Network Software & Services category) and about our identity and security management solutions. Check out the video coverage from Las Vegas on the Interop website.

Hack Week at Novell has begun. All this week, Novell engineers (along with interested community members) in the Open Platform Solutions/Linux group are just working on projects and ideas that capture their imaginations. Engineers are gathered at major Novell development sites (Beijing, Bangalore, Prague, Nuremberg, Boston, Provo and Portland) to collaborate on all kinds of projects and ideas. Working alone or in teams, on projects of their own devising or someone else’s, Novell developers are working on whatever they want, with awards for categories like “best overall project” and “greatest potential” happening at the end of the week.

You can see the cool project ideas and keep up on what’s happening throughout the week here.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced Silverlight, a rich internet application framework it is unrolling to improve the user experience on web sites and web applications. When Microsoft made the announcement, Novell’s Miguel de Icaza was asked whether the Mono project, which delivers technology to run Windows applications on non-Windows platforms, would support Silverlight. He said it would. Now, true to his word, Miguel will be demoing an early preview of Silverlight running on Linux, via Mono, at Microsoft’s MIX conference in Paris this week. The implementation is targeted to be compatible with Microsoft Silverlight 1.1, the current working build of Silverlight. This will allow Linux users to access content on the web that is being designed and built with Microsoft’s Silverlight technology.

The speed in which the Mono team has made this happen really reveals the power of the Mono platform. This preview comes only two months after Microsoft released Silverlight 1.1, and it took the Mono developers only 21 days to implement Silverlight on Mono. Mono continues to prove itself as the best solution in the market for taking Windows applications quickly and easily to Linux, Mac and other platforms. To track the progress of this project, check here.

The public beta of Novell ZENworks Configuration Management is now available. Check out these identity-driven management services for Windows desktops which provide a complete suite of discovery, management, provisioning, access, security and orchestration solutions. Download the beta here.

I spent yesterday at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, hosted by Google in Mountain View. This is the coming out party for the Linux Foundation, which was formed back in January through the merger of the Free Standards Group and the Open Source Development Lab. The Foundation has picked up the mandates of both of those groups – promoting Linux, protecting Linux, and standardizing Linux, primarily through the Linux Standards Base initiative.

Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, kicked it off by emphasizing the need for better collaboration between the various elements of the Linux community – developers, distributors, and end users, and offering the Linux Foundation as a forum for helping drive this collaboration. The event itself was a good case in point. It brought together key Linux kernel guys – Andrew Morton, James Bottomley, Novell’s Greg Kroah-Hartman, Chris Wright from Red Hat, and others – with reps from the ISV and IHV community, and with customers. On day one, there were panels on kernel development, the industry vendor perspective, ISV support for Linux, legal protections for Linux, and an end user panel. Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu did a keynote focused on improving the tools and processes for collaboration between all members of the extended Linux community.

There was plenty of give and take with audience members, including developers, vendor types, customers and press. Reflecting the clear importance Linux has assumed in the corporate world, both Reuters and BusinessWeek had folks there. A number of themes emerged, but a few that kept coming back were:

- The process is good, but it could be much better. The feedback loop for getting feature requests to the kernel team, coding those features into the kernel, and communicating the availability of those features back to the users isn’t as seamless as it could be. But there’s been much progress over the last few years.

- Collaboration isn’t as easy as it sounds. Developers that are working in specific areas with well established groups are able to work well together, but groups working on different distributions or different areas don’t have an automatic way to plug into a good collaborative tool. The Linux Foundation can play a role here.

- The fact that different distributions – SUSE Linux Enterprise, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu and others are on different upgrade cycles, all of which are longer than the revision cycle of the kernel, itself, creates a mismatch that doesn’t optimize the platform.

- Power consumption is a complicated, but hugely important, issue for Linux developers to address, and it’s a definite area of focus. Linux for mobile devices is also another area of major focus, both for industry players and the kernel team.

- Intellecual property issues are out there, but not a major concern for the kernel developers. There was discussion of GPL3, with divergent opinions on whether and how quickly it’ll be adopted by various projects. A number of lawyers who were involved in the Free Software Foundation committees were on the panel, and they all felt the end result was a good license. Both legal and vendor representatives urged people to “chill out” about GPL3 and let the license move forward into the market in a measured way.

For me, the interaction at this event was as interesting as the content. I’ve been to both technical shows – like LinuxWorld Expo – and business oriented events – like the recent Open Source Business Conference. This was the only one where I’ve seen kernel developers in a public, open give-and-take with end user customers. Typical of the exchange was a comment by a customer that he couldn’t get the “suspend/resume” function working on his Linux desktop. A developer said, “bring it to the back of the room, we’ll look at it. This is how we learn to code away this type of problem.” It seems like a pretty basic, common-sense approach. The open source community has now scaled to an extent that this has become not just a viable, but an incredibly effective, way to build, test, de-bug and improve software.

All in all, a pretty interesting event, and some really sharp people.

A few weeks back we solicited your questions on chargeback and other virtualization management issues. Last week, Alan Murray, Novell’s vice president of product management, participated in a virtual panel discussion hosted by Virtual Strategy Magazine to help provide answers.

Listen to the podcast to learn more about what Novell, IBM and SWsoft say are some of the advantages of chargebacks and management challenges companies may face as they build out their virtualization strategies.