Underexposed

Novell has endowed its OpenSuse Build Service with the ability to produce software for its main rival, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a clone called CentOS, the company said Thursday.

The build system was originally established so programmers could make sure their software works on new versions of Novell's Suse Linux products. The build system already worked with two other Linux distributions, Debian and Ubuntu.

Why the largesse from Novell?

My guess is that the company hopes to tow more open-source developers into its orbit, but there are altruistic motives as well: "By adding support to build packages for CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the OpenSuse Build Service makes it even easier to build packages across multiple Linux distributions, thus further enabling innovative ideas to spread quickly throughout the free and open source software community," said Michael Loeffler, Novell's OpenSuse product manager, in a statement.

• Novell Financial Results for Fourth Fiscal Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2007. $22 million was from Linux Platform Products, up 69 percent year-over-year
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• Sun releases Netbeans 6.0. New features include the ability to code not just Java software, but also C, C++, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript. Open-source software.
• Google Developer Podcast: Android with Dianne Hackborn and Jason Parks. BeOS and Palm coders talk Android.
• Google Code Blog: Embed charts in Web pages with Google APIs. Cool embeddable chart feature. I couldn't figure out how to define data sets on first glance, though.
• Books: None of the Above: Books: The New Yorker. Malcolm Gladwell reviews James Flynn's "What Is Intelligence?": "An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are."
• 451 CAOS Theory » Open source fashion?! Nah.. The fashion industry picks up on the fashionable term "open source."
• JBoss Founder Marc Fleury Joins Appcelerator Board of Advisers. Outspoken JBoss ex-CEO can't stay out of the fray after all.

The SCO Group, working to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, hopes to sell its Unix assets to York Capital Management for up to $36 million, the company said this week in regulatory and bankruptcy court filings.

Through the deal, York would provide SCO with $10 million in cash; up to $10 million in credit to fund its Linux-related legal fight and to get 20 percent of revenue from that action; $10 million for a 20 percent stake in the company; and $6 million to license the Hipcheck products from SCO's Me mobile device software effort and to share revenue from that line, according to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court filing.

SCO, which is engaged in expensive, controversial but so far largely fruitless Linux-related lawsuits against Novell and IBM, urged the court to approve an accelerated bidding process for the assets. The auction would allow others to offer a higher price than York, but time is of the essence, the company argued in the bankruptcy court filing.

"Based on debtors' (SCO's) financial condition, but more importantly the skittishness of existing and potential customers" to engage in a business relationship with SCO, "the debtors must move quickly to realize the highest and best price for their assets," the filing said.

The SCO Group has been beleaguered by steadily dwindling revenues. It suffered a major legal setback in August when a court found that Novell retained the Unix copyrights SCO thought it bought. But it looks like the Lindon, Utah-based company plans to keep on fighting: the asset purchase agreement specifically excludes the suits against Novell and IBM from transfer.

Unix has had a long and winding history as assets have been sold from the original sponsor of the operating-system project, AT&T. The assets were sold to Novell, then to the Santa Cruz Operation, then to Linux seller Caldera International, which renamed itself The SCO Group after trying to remake its business on the SCO Unix products. It's a tortured issue trying to decipher exactly what intellectual property--patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets--traveled to new ownership or remained with earlier owners.

An SCO representative didn't comment beyond the filing. York didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Suddenly all those discussions about the discordant ways of open-source software and patent law have become a lot less abstract.

Companies called IP Innovation and Technology Licensing Corporation sued Red Hat and Novell on Tuesday, claiming the top Linux sellers' software products infringe U.S. patent 5,072,412, "User interface with multiple workspaces for sharing display system objects," and two identically named patents. The suit (PDF), in the U.S. District Court in Eastern Texas, seeks damages and a permanent injunction prohibiting any further infringement.

Red Hat spokeswoman Leigh Day said Friday only that the company is aware of the suit and "will review the situation." Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry said the company is assessing the suit and that "it's too early to tell, tactically, whether it makes sense for us and Red Hat to join forces."

But as with another recent case, the Software Freedom Law Center's copyright infringement suit against Monsoon Multimedia, which takes the offensive in enforcing free and open-source programming interests, the ripples will likely travel well beyond this particular case.

"Although I and many attorneys in the open-source industry have long been concerned about patent challenges to open-source companies, this case appears to be the first by patent trolls against an open-source licensor," said Mark Radcliffe, a DLA Piper intellectual property attorney who has long been involved in open-source legal matters, on his blog. IP Innovation is a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Acacia has licensed patents to a wide variety of companies, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Samsung, Exxon, J.C. Penney, the Walt Disney Co., Wendy's, Revlon, Orbitz, General Electric and 3M, according to the company. It had revenue of $46.8 million from the third quarter of 2006 through the second quarter of 2007.

Buying a license to a patent is often the quickest way to make such lawsuits go away, and companies often do so because it can be cheaper than a multimillion-dollar, drawn-out suit that occupies many employees' hours. But licensing a patent isn't such a simple matter when it comes to open-source software.

For example, a company that distributes a program such as the Linux kernel under the General Public License (GPL) isn't permitted to do so if it doesn't grant all recipients of the software the rights it has.

And in general, the patent system is somewhat at odds with open-source software in general. The former grants a limited-term monopoly to an inventor, but the latter involves unencumbered sharing of technology.

One obvious aggressor is Microsoft. Chief Executive Steve Ballmer declared in May that Linux and other open-source projects infringe 235 Microsoft patents. And according to a BetaNews transcript of another speech this week in England, Ballmer said more recently, "People (who) use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to eventually to compensate us."

Red Hat offers a warranty in which it promises to replace any code found to infringe others' intellectual property, and both it and Novell offer customers legal protections. They have deeper pockets than most open-source companies, but they are by no means the only distributors of Linux-based products.

Groklaw, a site that monitors open-source legal actions and helped bring the new suit to light, predicted the suit would be a fitting sequel to The SCO Group's long-running but faltering Linux-related cases against IBM, Novell and others. "I think SCO II has arrived," said Groklaw founder Pamela Jones in a posting Thursday evening.

Jones pounced on two Microsoft connections, both also on Acacia's Web site: Brad Brunell joined the company this month as senior vice president after 16 years at Microsoft, including general manager of intellectual property licensing, and Jonathan Taub, who joined in July as vice president after leaving Microsoft as director of strategic alliances for the company's mobile and embedded devices division.

Two years after acquiring the company that developed the AppArmor security software for Linux, Novell has laid off team members behind the project, CNET News.com has learned.

AppArmor's founder and leader, Crispin Cowan, joined Novell in 2005 when it acquired his company, Immunix, which developed the software. But he and four others from the project lost their Novell jobs in Portland, Ore., on September 28, Cowan confirmed.

However, he plans to continue AppArmor development. He and two other laid-off AppArmor programmers, Steve Beattie and Dominic Reynolds, launched an AppArmor consulting company on Wednesday called Mercenary Linux.

"I have lots of reputation capital. I can get another job. But I care about AppArmor as a project and I want it succeed," Cowan said in an interview Thursday. However, the change was a surprise: "I'm stunned. I was getting bonuses and raises and awards up until the time I was laid off."

AppArmor, which Novell said will still be hosted on its Web site, is software that grants software only the privileges and access it needs, an approach that reduces the powers a remote attacker can get from a compromised computer. Although leading Linux seller Red Hat is backing an earlier rival technology called SELinux, Canonical is building AppArmor into its next version of Ubuntu, Gutsy Gibbon, and Mandriva has included AppArmor in its new Mandriva Linux 2008.

Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry wouldn't comment on specifics of the layoff, but said job cuts are "part of our ongoing restructuring efforts we've been talking throughout the year." Part of that effort involves "improving our product development process."

Novell will continue updating AppArmor and using and it in its Suse Linux Enterprise Server software, but the development mechanism has changed since Novell released AppArmor as open-source software in 2006. Some companies outsource programming work to India, but with active open-source software projects, there's even lower-cost options.

"An open-source AppArmor community has developed. We'll continue to partner with this community," though the company will continue to develop aspects of AppArmor, Lowry said.

Cowan was concerned that resources need to be focused directly on the project.

"Novell wants the community to pick up maintenance and development of AppArmor. But tossing it in the wind and hoping is not good enough assurance for me, so now it's my business to go find sponsors who are willing to pay for AppArmor development," Cowan said.

Mercenary Linux will write security profiles for software, though that's not a difficult task, as well as translate the software to new hardware, help to embed it in particular devices, and, potentially, revamp it for use on different operating systems, Cowan said.

But chiefly he expects Mercenary Linux to get by on smaller projects. "It's much easier to sell a small chunk of AppArmor development to somebody who needs something specific than it is to sell the whole concept," he said. "If somebody loves us and one day wants to acquire Mercenary, that's great."

For most of the world, Novell's NetWare operating system may have faded to footnote status, but Novell continues to grind away at its plan to modernize the software.

The new NetWare, called Open Enterprise Server, is an attempt to rebuild the operating system's services atop Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). Version 1.0 essentially was a bundle that included both operating systems, but with OES 2.0, which Novell announced on Monday, the two operating systems got a lot closer.

The reason for the proximity: Xen virtualization software, which lets the same physical server run multiple operating systems simultaneously. For more than a year now, SLES has included the open-source Xen virtualization software, and now NetWare can use it too.

In OES 2.0, NetWare has been updated with technology called paravirtualization, in which the operating system is adapted to explicitly work with the underlying virtualization software. One primary advantage of this approach is that Novell just has to ensure that Novell works with Xen's virtual foundation; it no longer must support the unceasing parade of new hardware directly within NetWare.

In another modernization move, Novell has endowed NetWare its first support for 64-bit x86 processors through the OES 2.0 release. And a feature called Dynamic Storage Technology lets administrators set policies to automatically move disused data to slower but cheaper storage such as tape.

OES 2.0 costs $203 for a one-user license. Maintenance charges are $53 for one year, $92 for two, and $127 for three.

Novell released OpenSuse 10.3 Thursday, its latest free version of the open-source operating system.

Fancy 3D effects include windows that flame out when closed.

(Credit: Novell)

For those who need a refresher, OpenSuse is the faster-moving but mostly unsupported version of Linux from Novell and various outside contributors. It competes most directly with Linux versions such as Canonical's Ubuntu and Red Hat's Fedora. Novell has tried for years to pit it against Windows as well, even as it cooperates with Microsoft in a legally thorny partnership. Novell's supported product, Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server, is sold in the form of an annual support subscription.

Like most versions of Linux, OpenSuse has a choice of graphical interfaces. Version 10.3 includes new versions of the two most widely used, GNOME 2.20 and KDE 3.5.7, along with some elements of the forthcoming KDE 4.

Novell has been an eager adopter of fancy interface graphics, and 10.3 includes the Compiz and Compiz Fusion infrastructure for 3D effects such as desktop workspaces that map to the faces of a cube, or slightly blurred background windows, or windows that burst into flames upon closing. For those who want to head the other direction, version 4.4.1 of the minimalist graphics interface XFCE is an option.

You can either download OpenSuse for free or buy a $60 two-DVD set with a manual 90 days of installation help.

There are some notable new features, according to Novell and OpenSuse News:

• Version 2.6.22 of the Linux kernel.

• OpenOffice.org 2.3.

• Xen 3.1 and VirtualBox 1.5 virtualization software, handy for running Windows software but a complicated technology. Also included is virtual machine configuration support in the Yast management tool and an experimental version of the KVM virtualization software.

• A one-click install option to more easily add OpenSuse packages stored online.

• A new set of installation discs. Instead of coming on 5 CDs, OpenSuse comes on just one--one for KDE and a different for GNOME--with extras downloadable. Alternatively, the whole kit and caboodle is on a DVD.

• Easier installation support for proprietary audio and video "codecs" needed to decode files. When the Amarok or Banshee media players encounter an MP3 file for the first time, a dialog box will appear presenting the option to download the MP3 codec.

Microsoft and Novell plan to announce Wednesday the opening of a joint lab in Cambridge, Mass., where a team of programmers will work to make the two companies' products work better together.

The 2,500-square-foot lab "will be home to a combined team of the best and brightest Microsoft and Novell engineers focused on making Windows Server and Suse Linux Enterprise from Novell," the companies said in a statement. "This kind of technical interoperability work requires disciplined effort and dedicated resources, and that's what this lab is built around," said Suzanne Forsberg, Novell's Interoperability Lab manager.

But the number of best and brightest involved in the effort can be counted on two hands, minus thumbs. "Microsoft and Novell are currently working to round out the team of eight, which represents a balanced team of Microsoft and Novell engineers," a Microsoft representative said.

The first priority of the interoperability work will be virtualization, which lets a copy of Windows or Linux run in a compartment called a virtual machine; Microsoft and Novell each have different hypervisor projects that run such virtual machines. Other interoperability work will cover file formats, systems management, and linking Microsoft and Novell directory technology, which is used to govern tasks such as who's allowed to log on to a file server.

The lab is one fruit of an unusual partnership between the two rivals that also involved patent protections and most peculiarly, Microsoft sales of Novell's Linux products.

Markus Rex is leaving Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server project for the time being to take over as chief technology officer of the Linux Foundation.

At the foundation, Rex replaces Ian Murdock, the Debian Linux founder whom Sun Microsystems hired to be chief operating system officer in March. Rex will take Murdock's role not only as CTO of the foundation, but also as chairman of the Linux Standard Base (LSB), a years-old but so still incomplete effort to make it easier for software companies to ensure compatibility with various incarnations of the open-source operating system.

"I need a full-time CTO over here. (Murdock) is a busy guy at Sun. The intent was always to replace Ian as CTO," said foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. In addition to overseeing the LSB, Rex will handle technical duties such as leading the foundation's interactions with programmers and a program that lets developers sign nondisclosure agreements so they can write software support for unreleased hardware

The foundation was formed last year through the merger of two other organizations trying to oversee some elements of Linux, the Free Standards Group and the Open Source Developer Labs.

Rex joined then-independent German Linux seller Suse in 1999 and stayed with the company through Novell's acquisition in 2004. He's held various roles, including running the SLES business unit, but for the last six months has worked on strategy for SLES services and consulting. He's scheduled to return to Novell at the end of 2008, the foundation said.

Zemlin, not surprisingly, bridled when I asked if the LSB has been chiefly of "academic" rather than practical interest. It's true that the allies working on the standards effort have put many years' work into winning support from those who sell or distribute Linux and writing software that makes it easier to test for compliance to the standard.

But he and Rex did acknowledge that software companies by and large still certify not to LSB, but to specific products such as SLES or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

"Now that we've got LSB permanently anchored in all the operating systems, we need to get application vendors to adopt it and encourage application vendors to use LSB as their basis," Rex said. "For that, we have some work to do. We have to broaden the scope."

Even for those such as Adobe Systems who don't certify to LSB, though, they often use LSB as a stepping stone in the certification process, Zemlin added. And, he added, Rex is the "perfect guy" to build relationships with software companies and encourage them to use the LSB's testing tools.

Update: In an e-mail, Murdock said he's stepping down as LSB chairman now that there's a new Linux Foundation CTO. "Markus Rex is eminently qualified to lead this important effort forward, and I look forward to continuing to work with him in his new role," he said.