HangingChad writes "eWeek is reporting about Novell's plan to combine elements of both into a unified desktop. Apparently the work has already started. Chris Schlager, vice president of research and development for SUSE, thinks the differences between KDE and Gnome developers have been overstated. Apparently he's not a regular /. reader."

cbnet2004 writes "In what can be considered a win for Linux, Novell has announced NetWare will cease to exist as a standalone product by the end of the year. However, the CEO says: 'We are still committed to it and it is not going away. Our new Open Enterprise Server offering will have two components to it: SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and NetWare. NetWare is here for a long time to come.'" Read on for more bits from Novell's BrainShare conference, including a planned company-wide move to Linux.

Space_Soldier writes "According to News.com, YaST is going open source: 'For years, SUSE has considered its YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool) software for installing, configuring and managing Linux an advantage over its competitors and forbade them from incorporating it into the products they sold. But with the new plan, to be announced Monday at Novell's Brainshare conference, the company will release YAST under the GPL, sources familiar with the plan said.'" Several years ago, when I first used YaST, I found it to be superior to the rest of the all-in-one administation tools around at the time. It was generally regarded as a great program, save for the licensing. Today, that's no longer a concern.

ravydavygravy writes "Novell today released details of the next incarnation of its linux products, Suse 9.1, based on the 2.6 kernel. It will come in both 32 and 64-bit versions, and includes a LiveCD version, to help people convince their Windows-loving friends to make the switch. It'll ship with Gnome 2.4.2 and KDE 3.2.1, as well as demo versions of the text processing application Textmaker and the spreadsheet application Planmaker (from Softmaker - but do we really need another office suite?). Samba 3 will also feature in the default setup."

An anonymous reader writes "According to the MySQL User's Conference page, Chris Stone of Novell, the guy behind Open Source at Novell who was responsible for the purchase of SUSE and Ximian, will be speaking at the MySQL conference. Perhaps we finally get to see what Novell is planning to do with Linux?" (That conference is taking place in mid-April, in Orlando.)

Bill Kendrick writes "Novell's Asia-Pacific division is working on Linux desktop trials in Hong Kong and Malaysia, with the expectation that Linux's adoption on enterprise desktops will continue to grow. They expect many more companies to start embracing it within the next 12 months." A spokesperson from Novell comments: "I don't see it as a watershed where everybody's running Linux desktops, but you'll start to see the emergence of some examples of companies that have embraced Linux and are going down that path."

mugnyte writes "Those tireless folks at groklaw have transcribed and published the documents from the latest IBM/SCO hearing. In it, the exact lines of the supposed Dynix / AIX / Linux logic are given. SCO claimed that Linux's read copy update, journaling file system, enterprise volume management system, AIO (Asynchronous I/O), and "scatter gather" I/O code had been derived from either AIX or Dynix/ptx. Now we can take a look at what SCO thinks makes Linux an enterprise-ready platform started at 2.4, stealing away their market share. However, IBM released these things under the GPL ... so what license did IBM really have from SCO to do this? Which raises the question, What license did SCO have from Novell to disallow this?"

A day with SCO is like a day without sunshine, I know that's what you're thinking. Novell is asking the court to dismiss SCO's lawsuit against them. Groklaw has taken a look at what is necessary to prove a 'slander of title' claim. And finally, reader loonix_gangsta wrote in and pointed to SCO's humorous 5 reasons to choose UNIX over Linux webpage.

grendelkhan writes "Novell has released their latest correspondance with the litigous bastards ordering them to stop the lawsuit by noon tomorrow, and clarify what the SVRX licensing agreements with AT&T meant regarding derivative works. The letter quotes AT&T from the April '85 issue of $echo as stating that they 'claim no ownership interest in any portion of such a modification or derivative work.' So much for the ladder rung analogy." And reader highwaytohell links to today's CRN article in which Eben Moglen suggests that the SCO/Linux lawsuit cannot move ahead "until SCO resolves its dispute with Novell. And regardless of which company prevails in court, he said, customers won't have to pay any company for a license fee since both claimants--SCO and Novell--have distributed the Linux code under the GPL. Once again, SCO have no comment."

BB maintainer Dan Mills writes "The Ximian Build System, Build Buddy, is now available to the community. This is a very exciting moment, and one that many of us at Ximian have been hoping would come. Build Buddy is a cross-platform packaging system designed with flexibility, reproducibility, and automation in mind. It features: support for producing RPM, Deb, and SD (HP-UX) packages; a testing/package verification framework; Red Carpet integration; command-line and Web interfaces; support for remote build scheduling via XML-RPC; reproducible build environments (chroot jails); and flexible XML package metadata description. Sound interesting? Visit primates.ximian.com/~thunder/bb for other documentation and links. We are very interested in starting a user and developer community around BB. Feel free to contact us via the mailing lists if you have any questions."

An anonymous reader writes "Along with suing Novell - it was announced today that SCO has been lobbying Congress about the horrifying ways that Linux and the rest of open source software saves users money, allows others to use the software anyway they see fit and 'gasp' causes SCO to not make as much money as they would like. Along with all of the usual FUD. OSAIA has the details (as well as a rebuke)." Darl's words will seem pretty transparent, even funny, to anyone aware of the widespread acceptance and use of Free / Open Source software (by individuals, governments, non-profits, and even companies like SCO) -- but you might have to point this out to your servants in Congress.

nadamsieee writes "Yahoo! Finance is carrying a press release from SCO that details a new lawsuit against Novell for "Slander of Title". It looks like SCO has finally ditched their failing product line in favor of 24/7 litigation and PR work." To recap: Novell and SCO have a lengthy correspondence over the meaning of the contract between the two companies, Novell registers a claim with the U.S. copyright office over the code in dispute, SCO files this suit in response. Update: 01/20 23:04 GMT by M : SCO has placed their complaint (pdf) online.

scubacuda writes "ZDnet and others report that Red Hat now offers the 'Open Source Assurance Program' as protection for customers if they get hit with a copyright infringement case from the SCO Group. From their website: 'A key feature of the Open Source Assurance Program is an Intellectual Property Warranty. The warranty ensures, that in the event that an infringement issue is identified in Red Hat Enterprise Linux software code, Red Hat will replace the infringing code. Red Hat's warranty assures customers that they can use Red Hat Enterprise Linux and related solutions without interruption. The warranty is available for all customers having a valid registered subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux or related solutions.'" Following close behind Novell and Hewlett-Packard, but it looks like Red Hat is not actually indemnifying their customers like Novell and HP, but rather is simply promising to fix any real copyright problems moving forward, which is something I think we would assume they would do in any case.

drizst 'n drat writes "Article posted recently on ZDNet that 'companies outside the United States that use Linux now face the threat of legal action from the SCO Group, following the announcement on Wednesday that SCO's licenses are available worldwide.'" And cbiltcliffe writes "Vnunet is reporting that SCO is now threatening legal action against UK businesses that run Linux. Yet again, they claim they're going to initiate legal action against Linux users 'within a couple of weeks.' (Funny...weren't they saying that back in September?) They also claim that Novell and HP indemnification schemes are essentially useless (similar to SCO's Linux licences). It definitely appears the media is getting somewhat wiser to the FUD, however, as the story reports 'The run-time licence only permits use of what SCO says is its IP,' rather than 'The licence permits use of SCO's IP' like we would have heard a couple of months ago."

cyxs writes "Here is Novell's page with letters that have been sent back and forth between Novell and SCO. Very interesting read."

Anonymous Coward writes "Novell today said it intends to indemnify its enterprise Linux users against possible legal action by The SCO Group and/or others. According to eWeek Novell's new Linux Indemnification Program is designed to provide its SUSE Enterprise Linux customers with protection against intellectual-property challenges to Linux and to help reduce the barriers to Linux adoption in the enterprise. Under the terms of the program, Novell will offer indemnification for copyright infringement claims made by third parties against registered Novell customers who obtain SUSE Enterprise Linux 8 after January 13, 2004, upgrade protection and a qualifying technical support contract from Novell or a Novell channel partner."

dhunley writes "According to TechCentral, a recent story on Novell's plans following the acquisition of both SuSE and Ximian comments that 'SuSE will continue (to operate) as a business unit of its own', according to John Phillips, Novell's corporate technology strategist for the Asia Pacific region. 'We don't expect to make Ximian the default user interface, and for the medium term KDE will remain the default GUI on SuSE Linux'."

Int27h quotes The Age saying "Just before Christmas last year, Novell announced publicly that SCO had known for some time that it did not receive all rights and ownership to UNIX technologies, despite public statements to the contrary. Novell has made public correspondence between lawyers representing both Novell and SCO." Lots of links and commentary on what continues to be one of the strangest stories in the history of Linux.

prostoalex writes "InternetNews.com describes the reaction to Microsoft's decision on FAT licensing. It doesn't look like the company is expecting to make any significant money out of licenses (there's also a cap of $250K, so none of the big guys will have to pay millions to Microsoft). It also doesn't look like Linux companies are stressed over this decision. "We are only accessing FAT32 file systems, not using them. This licensing program is of little interest to SuSE", a Novell/SuSE spokesperson said."

Sparky writes "We've already heard that SCO have invoked the DMCA via 'letters sent to select Fortune 1000 Linux end users.' The specifics come via a copy of the letter reprinted at LWN.net - they've decided that they own the copyright to about 65 header files contained in Linux - largely errno.h, signal.h and ioctl.h." balloonpup also notes "CNet News has reported that SCO has reported a fourth quarter loss of $1.6 million, owing mostly to hefty legal fees in its war against Linux. SCO said they would have reported $7.4 million in earnings, if not for the $9 million payout to their lawyers. Way to go, SCO!" Many readers also point out a Groklaw article indicating Novell has registered for the copyrights on multiple versions of Unix with the U.S. Copyright Office, so that "both the SCO Group and Novell have registered for UNIX System V copyrights for the same code."