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Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer plans to exit the software giant within a year. The new CEO will need to manage a major acquisition (Nokia) -- essentially playing catch-up with market-trailing products. It sounds a lot like Novell around 1995. And that's alarming. Let me explain why.

Description: BASIS is a Linux-based operating system made with OpenSuSe 12.3 and also the GNOME 3 shell. Built using SuseStudio, this independent Linux distribution... 32 bit...

Novell, which we expected to be near the top of the list, came in as a relatively trusted company by our readers. With an eighth place showing, only IBM scored fewer votes. We have little doubt that five years or so ago, Novell would’ve probably been right behind Microsoft as one of the least trusted companies in the FOSS world, due primarily to their dealings with Microsoft in support of their SUSE Linux distro, which many people thought was both underhanded and designed to spread FUD.

Two years after it acquired Novell and took the company private, the Attachmate Group says its decline has been arrested. It anticipates being able to hold that line next year.

The other side of the coin, the bad players in the free software world, might be best represented by Oracle, who inherited a slew of important open source projects with their takeover of Sun Microsystems a few years back. As we’ve observed before, part of the problem with Oracle is that sharing and software freedom isn’t in the company’s genetic structure. Like many proprietary vendors, they believe in nurturing their clients by using the mushroom philosophy–that is by keeping them in the dark and feeding them plenty of malarkey.

If IBM (NYSE:IBM) sells its x86 server business to Lenovo (as many reports expect) it's a safe bet that Lenovo will remain committed to supporting Linux (Red Hat and SUSE, in particular) and Windows Server across the hardware line. Here's why.

I really do think that OpenSuSE 12.3 is the best in the OpenSuSE 12.x range. But that's far not the best operating system. And, I should admit, this is not the honest operating system. It's a cheater!

Today in his personal blog, Miguel de Icaza, founder of Gnome, and one of the most polarizing personalities in the free software world, announced that he is finished with the Linux platform –at least for personal use.

Did anybody else notice Novell BrainShare 2013 occurred last week in Salt Lake City? It was a prime opportunity to promote Novell’s progress under Attachmate’s ownership. Plus, SUSE Linux (Novell’s sister business) could have published some updated business milestones of its own. Did Novell and SUSE deliver? Here’s the scorecard.

Not the downsized “new and improved” Novell owned by Attachmate, though they have briefly been a part of this story. We’re talking about the old, basically inept Novell–the company that once practically owned enterprise networking back in the day when Bill Gates was shortsighted enough to believe that the future of computing was in stand alone and unconnected boxes. You know, the Novell that was second cousin, by way of Raymond Noorda and the Canopy Group, to SCO. The same Novell that decided to save their proprietary business by embracing open source and buying the SUSE Linux distribution in an attempt to reposition themselves as a poor man’s IBM sans hardware.

It generally worked fine, but the unreliability of both Okular and the shutdown process means that better KDE distributions for long-term work use can be found.

After a disappointing version 12.1, openSUSE is back with version 12.2, and I find that it works really well!

Two leading GNU/Linux players have explained their plans about how to deal with secure boot. While Canonical decided to ditch Grub2 due to GPLv3, Fedora's approach was to use Grub2 and use Microsoft keys. That left openSUSE/SUSE Linux Enterprise.

The Document Foundation has released an infographic showing the current state of growth of the LibreOffice office suite. The document shows a steady increase in downloads per week and new code committers, while a variable graph for code contributors and commits per month.

LXer Feature: 02-Jul-2012

The latest installment of the LXWR of the weeks big stories for your reading pleasure. Sorry its a day late. Enjoy!

When I first got into IT back in the late 90?s as a teen, I was always baffled by the landscape in regards to infrastructure and software. And coming from a Linux background, who could blame me? When I went off to get my secondary education, I chose the vocational route and I chose to certify in Novell and Microsoft because they were the two major players at the time.

Currently Linux, as a worldwide community, faces strong fragmentation. Not all of us use KDE, or Gnome, or a graphical interface at all. At the end of the day these communities are the ones creating new software, new widgets, and new graphics. Eventually these fragmentation or macro-collaboration environment is unable to achieve "collective individuality." This means that because of the different influences that happen in a Linux environment, collectively we cannot achieve a strong branding and differentiation. We cannot stand out because all of us want to stand out. Our software or contributions speak the language and mind of its creator, except in a Linux environment, anyone can be a creator.

LXer Feature: 10-Jun-2012

All kinds of big news this week for you LXWR readers out there. Linus express his true feelings for the newest Gnome, Red Hat decides to get into bed with Microsoft, Our own Carla Schroder has an opinion on it, Mark Shuttleworth thinks Windows Azure is great..and here I thought I had heard it all. Nope, not even close. Enjoy!

Microsoft alleged years ago that Linux and Open Source technologies infringe on over 200 Microsoft patents. It's that basic allegation that Microsoft used to convince Novell/SUSE to sign a a Patent deal and it's the same basic underpinning for a dozen deals with Android vendors. So why is Microsoft allowing Linux to run on its Azure cloud? In particular, why Ubuntu?

I've continued to watch the SUSE Linux community closely ever since Attachmate acquired Novell and the SUSE business in early 2011. I've also kept one eye on openSUSE, the community-driven, open-development version of the distribution. So what’s new with SUSE and openSUSE? Here are some guesses based on upcoming conferences.

Back in 2008 and 2009 I kept a really close eye on the top 50 open source companies and their partnering strategies. Fast forward to 2012 and whatever became of those top 50 open source companies? Some are thriving, some are dead, and some are repositioning for the cloud and barely even mention open source anymore. Here's the update.

openSUSE 12.2 Milestone 3 is now available for download and testing. It was expected to be released last week but there were some delays due to the move to a i686 desktop kernel for 32-bit systems.

Jury 'hopelessly' deadlocked Novell's reanimated antitrust case against Microsoft's Word is reported to have hit "hopeless" deadlock, with Novell pushing for a fresh trial.…

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A federal judge on Friday dismissed a Utah company's $1 billion federal antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. after a jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict.

To get a sense what SUSE is in for in 2012, I talked to Nils Brauckmann this morning. Brauckmann's involvement with SUSE started with Attachmate's purchase, so the first time we spoke was earlier this year just after he took over the role. This time I found him much readier to discuss details of the SUSE strategy, if not every minor product detail.

Novell and SUSE Linux may technically be separate companies, but they are owned by the same Attachmate conglomerate and they still have to work together on specific products, such as Open Enterprise Server, which bolts NetWare print and file services to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

openSUSE KDE is a perfect desktop for those are not comfortable with the changes Gnome 3 or Unity is bringing. Not that I have any issues with Gnome 3 or Unity – I recommend both. But, if you are not comfortable, and as free software is all about options, I heavily recommend openSUSE KDE. You get the stability of openSUSE, the ease of use, elegance, customization of KDE and a familiar interface.

Most things (apart from the usual newer versions of programs) have stayed the same or improved since version 11.4...except apparently for hardware support, which can be a dealbreaker (and was for me).

Opensuse 12.1 has been released! This release bring awesome improvements include the latest GNOME 3.2 desktop as well as the newest from KDE, Xfce opensuse-logoand LXDE; your own Cloud made easy with mirall; Snapper-shots of your file system.

Chromium Browser talks with Telepathy (IM/Chat Library) to provide an in-browser IM client - prototype

Anyone paying attention to technology news lately knows that the Titans are clashing for control, or at least a share of the monetary rewards, in the mobile marketplace.

While AMD's open-source strategy was announced on Phoronix on 7 September 2007, it was on 17 September of the same year that the Novell/SUSE developers did their first public release of their xf86-video-radeonhd driver. This was the X.Org driver created by the Novell Linux engineers in months prior for R500 and R600 GPUs. Here is some special reading -- a letter that was volleyed from Novell to AMD that kicked off this entire process -- to celebrate what would have been the fourth birthday of this open-source Linux driver.

LXer Feature: 11-Sept-2011

Welcome to this week's collection of big stories from the LXer Newswire. Enjoy!

LibreOffice Logo Michael Meeks, a LibreOffice developer at Novell, compared the codebase of LibreOffice with the OpenOffice.org sources hosted at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). As he writes in a blog post, the differences are already so great that it will now be hard to exchange new code between the two projects. In light of the several million lines of source code by which the two products now differ, he says users should not assume that code committed to Apache OpenOffice.org will "inevitably and automatically appear in LibreOffice". "Instead I suspect we will end up cherry-picking and porting only those things that justify the effort, as/when/if there is any such thing," added Meeks.

Finally, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled [PDF] on SCO's appeal of its loss to Novell in the second jury/bench trial. The appeals court affirms in all respects. So, SCO loses again, and likely this is as far as it will go. Technically, SCO can ask the US Supreme Court to hear a further appeal, but that is very unlikely to happen and even less likely to be granted were it to happen. SCO has fallen downstairs, hitting its head on every step, to the very bottom, just like I told you in May of 2003, in the first article I ever wrote about SCO.

The trouble with FUD is at first it sounds correct, or at least plausible. So when Google complained about the Apple-Microsoft partnership and the deliberate patent policy against Google, Microsoft's first response sounded like a killer blow. It said it had asked Google to join them. But… let's take a little bit closer look, because in doing so, it let slip a fact that we did not know until now -- that Google tried to get the 800 or so Novell patents that CPTN, an entity Microsoft set up with Oracle, Apple and EMC, eventually won.

Microsoft renews its deal with Novell's successor for another five year years as the Linux desktop moves incrementally forward with KDE.

Compression of files is a necessity these days. It’s not only helps you in saving your space but also helps you in quick sharing and back up purposes. Text files compresses more than the web images and videos because they are already in the compressed form .You must have observed many open source softwares in the .tar.gz packages. These are the compressed file made out using the tar and gzip (gunzip) utility. So let’s get started with these great utilities

Ironically, up until that time, Novell and Microsoft had been archenemies, and much of Novell’s market share loses had been due to Redmond’s aggressive marketing. At the time of the SUSE purchase, many in the FOSS community had high hopes that Novell would become an open source asset, even though they had shown a proclivity in the past for snatching defeat out of the arms of victory. All hopes were dashed, however, when they embraced their old enemy with a deal they had to know wouldn’t set well in the FOSS world.

Keeping Red Hat out of Windows shops The SUSE division of Attachmate has managed to talk Microsoft into shelling out another chunk of change – $100m – to help prop up SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, the Linux distro formerly controlled by Novell, and to help drive Red Hat's rival distro from Windows shops.…

It's been four years since Microsoft and Novell inked their controversial interoperability agreement and it still had a year left to run. Even though SUSE is under new management with Attachmate Group, Microsoft liked the agreement so much that it decided to re-up the deal for another four years and $100 million. Attachmate looked the $100 million in the face, and said yes.

With a joint cloud computing push in mind, Microsoft and SUSE have extended their Windows-Linux interoperability relationship for another four years. As part of the deal, Microsoft has committed to investing $100 million in new SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates. Here’s a look at the potential upside, and lingering concerns from the open source community.

LXer Feature: 24-Jul-2011

In the Roundup this week we have RMS telling to resist the temptations of the cloud, good bye Kubuntu, numeric relativity with the Einstein Toolkit and Microsoft is in the top 5 contributors to the Linux kernel? Methinks not.. Enjoy!

I am a big fan of the Software Wars graphic map. Since it hasn’t been updated for years, MrTomLinux decided to recreate it from scratch in SVG and to share the files. Source is now forked it in github and can be used in inkscape for further forks

Novell, now owned by Attachmate, is marching forward with its BrainShare conference. But this won’t be any ordinary BrainShare. Instead, topics involving three Attachmate divisions — NetIQ, Novell and SUSE — are on the agenda. Can one conference serve so many different masters -- including Linux partners? Here's some insight.

SUSE Linux, now owned by Attachmate, is preparing a cloud strategy. That’s good news for partners that have remained loyal to SUSE amid the transition from Novell to Attachmate. And it's a safe bet SUSE will describe the strategy during Novell Brainshare. Here's the update.

Cats and dogs; apples and oranges; Linux and Microsoft. Two of these three things do not go together. Would you believe that Microsoft—yes Microsoft—was the fifth largest contributor to the soon to be released Linux 3.0 kernel? Believe it. In a Linux Weekly News story, currently only available to subscribers, an analysis of Linux 3.0 contributors reveals that Microsoft was the fifth largest corporate contributer to Linux 3.0. While only 15h overall, that still puts Microsoft behind only Red Hat, Intel, Novell, and IBM in contributing new code to this version of Linux.

News out of Nuremberg today is that SUSE has formally partnered up with Xamarin to take responsibility for the existing (and future) SUSE/Novell customers using Mono, to take over stewardship of the Mono project, and Xamarin gains rights to the IP surrounding Mono.

According to an article which recently appeared on LinuxInsider, “the biggest change and impact to the Linux landscape and market to date has been the advent of cloud computing”. The IT industry is headed towards a centralised data centre model once more with cloud computing gathering momentum and a swagger of big integrators and small start ups alike are offering services in this arena. Open source solutions such as Linux naturally thrive in the current environment where multiple platforms seek solace under the same apparent cloud.

Isolator++ For Linux Enables C++ developers on the Linux platforms to Isolate code and perform mocking easily – Typemock now providing Easy Unit Testing Solutions for Multiple Platforms – Windows .NET, C++ and Linux C++