alphadogg writes "Novell's CEO wrote to customers Saturday telling them that the software company has rejected a $2 billion bid by hedge fund Elliott Associates to take it private. He called the offer 'inadequate' and said Novell will review alternatives. Novell has struggled financially even as it has reinvented itself from its NetWare network operating roots into an open source (SUSE and Ximian) and management and security software company. Revenue fell 10% during its most recent fiscal year (wrapped up in October) and its net losses widened. CEO Hovsepian's total compensation fell 17% to $5.7 million."

Miguel de Icaza (Note, this Miguel is not the Ximian developer, just someone whose small life is fulfilled by trolling under someone else's name) writes "Here is a story revealing just how threatened Microsoft is by Google. While senior partners can expect the full chair experience, some lowly staffers who are putting in their notice are being escorted off campus immediately. Why? Because they've put in their notice to join Google. In Microsoft's eyes, Google is Enemy No. 1. Anyone leaving Redmond for the search leader is a threat. Not because they'll scurry around collecting company secrets — as if Google's interested in Microsoft's '90s-era technologies. Departing employees, however, might tell other 'Softies how much better Google is. If an employee is leaving for Amazon.com or another second-tier employer which doesn't make Microsoft so paranoid, they'll probably serve out the traditional two weeks of unproductive wrapping up. So if you're planning on leaving Microsoft for Google, pack up your belongings and say goodbye to friends ahead of time. There'll be no cake and two weeks of paid slacking for you."

smbarbour writes "The Mono project (the open-source .NET compatibility library acquired by Novell when Ximian was purchased) has released version 1.2. They are now including support for WinForms. Ars Technica has a detailed rundown on the new release. The Mono project supports Visual Basic.NET as well, so developers that use VB.NET now have the possibility of directly porting applications to Linux." From the article: "Relatively high memory consumption and performance bottlenecks are commonly perceived as being amongst Mono's most significant weaknesses. Some critics frequently refer to various performance issues to support arguments against broader adoption of Mono technology in open source projects, most notably within the GNOME community. The performance improvements in Mono 1.2 could potentially address such criticisms, but it is likely that a lot more work will be required before the problems are completely resolved."

An anonymous reader writes "Many people have complained about Firefox's memory use. Federico Mena-Quintero has a proposal for reducing the amount of memory used to store images, which, in his proof of concept code, 'reduced the cumulative memory usage... by a factor of 5.5.'."

Eugenia writes "Novell and OSNews are sponsoring the memory reduction project led by Novell's Ben Mauer by providing bounties to developers to help to clean up bloat in GNOME and related programs."

sp3298622 writes "Nat Friedman, co-founder of Ximian, expresses his excitement about the Hula collaboration Server, talks about the plugins in development for Evolution 2.2, the potential of XGL and the revolution of the Linux Desktop. The interview is a 30MB MP3 file."

PaaChhaa writes "The GNOME Foundation membership and elections committee has announced the preliminary results of this year's elections for the board of directors. There are a few new faces this year, and Miguel de Icaza, whose candidacy was rejected last year due to late submission, is back. The run up to this year's election saw a threat of boycott, which ultimately resulted in the online publication of the foundation's financial records. Also, a heated discussion followed the posting of the list of ten questions, and the opinions of the candidates and other foundation members on these issues can be found in the foundation-list archives for the months of November and December. A notable exclusion from this year's board is GNOME's release manager Jeff Waugh. who didn't run at all."

anyweb writes "Fedora Core Release 3 is out now, Heidelberg, 2.6.9-1.667 kernel, Firefox included ! Gnome 2.8 and more. Here are some screenshots" New release includes Gnome 2.8, KDE 3.3, Kernel 2.6.9, Firefox PR1, Thunderbird 0.8, Ximian Evolution 2.0 and more. Here is a Mirror List and Bit Torrent

SafeTinspector writes "ComputerWorld has a story regarding the sudden departure of Chris Stone, a respected open source advocate and the man often sited as the architect behind Novell's acquisistion of Ximian and SUSE as well as the recent open source orientation of Novell.
At the same time, Novell has a web site dedicated to dispelling the mistruths propogated in Microsoft's 'Get the Facts' campaign. What does all this mean to the future of Novell's Linux and Open Source strategy? Does any of this relate to the imminent release of Open Enterprise Server? Anybody?"

Karma Sucks writes "In an interesting debate with a Microsoft employee, Miguel points out some crucial flaws in Microsoft's Avalon strategy. Perhaps the most shocking revelation is the absolutely horrendous inheritence hierarchy exposed by the Avalon API. Miguel himself is clearly not amused, saying 'We do not want to waste our time with dead-end APIs as we are vastly under-resourced, so we must choose carefully.'"

jg21 writes "'Open source developers have the opportunity to influence technology that is being used by companies and do it on a global scale in a way that cannot occur with any other type of software,' contends Bill Claybrook, writing in the current issue of LinuxWorld. The article is a historical overview of the open source revolution, starting in the 80s with the GNU Project, BSD, and TCP/IP and then moving into the 90s with Red Hat, StarOffice, and coming right into the 21st century with the Ximian Desktop and Sun's Linux-based Sun Java Desktop System."

Moochman writes "The recent Desktop Integration Bounty (funded by Novell) will surely please people who want Evolution to be part of GNOME. But the Ximian Evolution copyright assignment has stirred up concerns in the community about whether contributors will be able to maintain their Free Software mores. Essentially, contributors to Evolution must give Novell copyright over any code they submit; then Novell is allowed to include this code in a proprietary product. Is this a smart business move, or a violation of the GPL?" Since all contributions are only at the request of the contributing coder, and considering that the copyright assignment form says that "Ximian agrees to grant back to Developer, and does hereby grant, nonexclusive, royaltyfree and noncancelable rights to use the Works," and specifies that Novell/Ximian release the code under a license compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (such as the GPL), it seems to protect the contributors rather well.

prostoalex writes "Technology Review has a feature story on Miguel de Icaza, currently Novell VP of Product Technology, but more known as the leader of Gnome and Mono projects. Miguel is the man Don Box would like to see joining Microsoft for his "amazing amount of raw energy". If you read through the Technology review article, you will see that de Icaza was actually turned down by Microsoft at some point."

norburym writes "This is an interesting format for a techie book geared at non-techies: instead of providing a detailed installation and configuration instruction set for a particular full Linux distribution, Marcel Gagne has included a Knoppix CD with his book, Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye! The author's intention is clearly to give the reader a no-risk introduction to Linux. As such, this book is not intended for power users or professionals; there are other books more suited for this market. At the same time, this book is not really for the Dummies style audience, either. It's for the Windows user who is looking to migrate to the Linux platform and find solutions to his or her day to day computing needs." Read on for the rest of norburym's review.

An anonymous reader writes "Sun's Java System Calendar Server connector (Hydrogen) for Evolution 1.4 on Solaris and Linux was GPL'ed today and is now available in GNOME CVS. This follows the recent GPLization of Novell's Ximian Connector (for Microsoft Exchange servers). In related news, the next major version of Evolution (version 2.0) is supposed to be released sometime during the next month, and beta testing have picked up pace. If you have some spare time, you can also give the Evolution 1.5.9 a spin. You can also use jhbuild to build Evolution from CVS (since the binaries are quite old by now). There is also a new project in GNOME CVS, called Evolution Brainread which adds a blog viewer to Evolution. It is not yet quite ready for production use, but looks quite good."

glockenspieler writes "Recently on the the Gnome Foundation mailing list, Dave Camp posted a draft Gnome Roadmap for versions 2.8 and Beyond. Issues up for discussion are Mozilla/Epiphany, incorportation of peer to peer filesharing, blogging, addition of more media widgets, and many others. Time for Gnome users to weigh in on what improvements that you would like to see. If that's not enough, then there's always the the C# versus Java versus ? discussion."

This almost turned into a "State of the Wine Project" discussion, but that's where your highest-moderated questions led, and Jeremy responded with his usual wit, wisdom, and candor.

Good news for those of you who've went through the pain of trying to get Mono installed on Mac OS X: the team has quietly added a Mac OS X package. If you previously installed to /usr/local, however, be aware that the packaged version installs to /opt/local and adjust any paths accordingly. The Beta-1 Windows installer has also been fixed; download it here.

ashmodai9 writes "According to this article on LinuxToday.com as well as this press release directly from their site, Novell announced that its "Connector for MS Exchange Server would be integrated into Evolution 2.0 and made available as open source, beginning today with the current Connector 1.4." Apparently, downloads will be available for the current version of Evolution starting May 14th." Thanks to reader crafterm, a snippet from Novell's Connector website: "With the Connector for Microsoft Exchange installed, Evolution functions as an Exchange client, enabling users to become full participants in company-wide group scheduling and other collaborative tasks. Linux and Solaris users can access public folders, Global Address Lists, email, calendar, task lists, and group scheduling information." Update: 05/11 17:58 GMT by T : In related news, ChiralSoftware writes "Codeweavers' long-awaited sequel to Crossover 2.1 is here. Just like the old version, the new version lets you install MS Office on Linux desktops. The new version adds support for Outlook XP, Lotus Notes and Microsoft Project."

SafeTinspector writes "Yesterday I attended a Novell/HP Linux seminer "Delivering & Deploying Linux Across the Enterprise" Among the boring and expected stuff, the Novell representative had several slides in his presentation claiming that Novell is going to get heavily involved with LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) to bring policy based security and administration to the LTSP similar to those found in Microsoft and Citrix terminal servers--probably through their venerable Zenworks product line. Also heavily hinted at would be an install wizard provided by Novell that would greatly simplify the installation and configuration of LTSP, which is currently quite complex. I can find no hard information about this on LTSP or Novell websites, nor any information within Google newsgroup search. Does anyone know more about this? On a side note, the laptops of both the HP rep and Novell rep were running SuSE Linux Desktop with Ximian XD2 installed and the presentation was made using OpenOffice Presentation."