Novell

Look at the news and the blogosphere, and lately it seems like every major distro company's in some kind of hot water with various elements of the community. Is it an inevitable product of business involvement in FLOSS?

In a seeming reversal, the holding consortium formed by Apple, EMC, Microsoft, and Oracle, known as CPTN Holdings, LLC, withdrew its application from the German Federal Cartel Office, leaving many hoping if this was a sign of the end of a patent deal that has sent shock waves through the open source community. This was not what happened.

The time has come for Pamela Jones to seriously reevaluate the roles she and her team of Groklaw volunteers have within the free and open source community. Such a reevaluation should not end with the closure of the Groklaw web site, but a big change must indeed come.

Microsoft's role in snapping up the 882 Novell patents for $450 million makes no difference in how Microsoft regards open source and how open source regards Microsoft. Not one bit of difference at all.

Novell was kind of a conservative company, not a natural revolutionary; but it helped launch the LAN revolution and, through that revolutions by email, Internet, Web and consumerization. It only survived the first.

Private-equity group Attachmate Corp. will purchase enterprise infrastructure software vendor Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL) for $2.2 billion, or $6.10 per share.

In case you missed it, and many seem to have, the second annual conference took place in Nürnberg, Germany on Oct. 20-23. The conference, which had the theme "Collaboration across Borders," seemed almost completely non-existent in the US tech media.

After years of waiting, the OpenOffice.org community gets a new Foundation.

For those who were hoping for some sort of direction from Oracle concerning OpenOffice.org during this week's conference in Budapest, you're going to be sadly disappointed.

Last week's weird rumor was that Canonical, makers of Ubuntu, were interested in acquiring the openSUSE project from Novell. Why that would make no sense, and what Canonical might really want to buy.

As The SCO Group quickly fades into history, let's be sure to note who helped write that history... and may have prevented a far less Linux-friendly outcome.