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● 12.16.07

●● The Story of a Novell Marionette

Posted in Africa, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Videos at 2:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Call it a mouthpiece, a code monkey, a puppet, a lapdog, a shill, or a marionette. Terminology does matter much. Some of the things Novell is doing at the moment are directly or indirectly affected by Microsoft’s own ambitions and we have provided many examples which prove this over the past year. There is even this old image that illustrates the relationship between Novell and its major funding source.

=> its major funding source

Some degree of manipulation comes from Novell’s acquisition of Ximian, which Stafford Masie described not as “red carpet”, but as something else. Masie was Novell’s South Africa Country Manager before escaping to Google. Here are portions of what he said (extracted from a transcript Shane provided):

=> before escaping to Google | ↺ extracted from a transcript Shane provided

Y’know why we bought Ximian? Does anyone know why we bought Ximian? Because they had cool software? No. We didn’t buy Ximian because of their Red Carpet software, we didn’t buy Ximian because of… the collaboration technologies that they had, we didn’t buy them for the desktop technologies that they had, we bought Ximian for one reason: we wanted people that were community heads, people that understood this community organically, that was extremely well respected, people like Nat Friedman and Miguel De Icaza, we wanted them within Novell.

[...]

And, I think the Microsfot thing came from that, it came from that, and I will lead into that in a second, so Ximian- the people, then we bought SUSE, now we bought SUSE because of the direction that was given to us by people within the company that truly understood the Linux community, and I think we’ve demonstrated our willingness, I think we’ve demonstrated our commitment, i think we’ve demonstrated… our investment that we are willing to make into the community and be a responsible member of it.

And, this morning, I’m just going to go through some of the things regarding the Microsoft agreement, this morning I want to make sure that we give proper time to discuss the software patent issue, that Derek surfaced. I think its a very prominent issue, and I think this is one of the benefits of this Microsoft agreement.

It’s rather ironic that we find a Ximian marionette right there in YouTube. It’s not a coincidence, but Ximian may represent a point in time when Novell began looking at another programming universe — one that it barely controls. █

=> ↺ right there in YouTube

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