Posted 11/20/09 at 07:24:20 AM by Paul Lilly

Despite the growing popularity of open source software, there's still the issue of how to make money with it. No easy task, warns Miguel de Icaza, Vice President of Novell, who also heads up the firm's open source Mono project.

"If your livelihood depends on the product that you're selling, until you can figure how you're going to make money on that thing, I say, keep it proprietary," de Icaza said.

The VP went on to say that it's "incredibly difficult" making an open source business. His remarks were in response to an audience member at the Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference), who raised the question of making money via open source. The issue of making money by selling support also came up.

"You need to take those steps carefully in my opinion," de Icaza said. "And support, by the way, is a horrible business. I want to be writing code, and I want to be paid to write code."

The VP did note that if you're a young developer without a lot of obligations, like a family and tuition, then it's far easier to consider doing open source projects.

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Posted 11/05/09 at 10:00:00 AM by Will Kraft

Although most Linux users rely on pre-built Linux distros and customize their software configuration after installation, there is nothing quite like having a Linux distro that was custom-designed to your specifications. This allows you to get whatever you want out of the box, but in the past it was difficult to create such a distro since it involved compiling the entire operating system from source. (something firmly in the realm of advanced-to-expert-level users)

In more recent years, it has become possible to create your own Linux distro through various easy-to-use online interfaces. The most well-known distro customization tool is Slax (which we recently discussed) but Novell has a tool called SuSE Studio in closed beta which allows you to assemble your own custom SuSE-based distro from pre-compiled packages. Right now, SuSE Studio is still invite-only since Novell gives you storage space on their servers and bandwidth to both store and download your creations.

Read on to learn how we built our own Maximum PC-themed Linux distro!

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Posted 11/05/09 at 07:55:21 AM by Paul Lilly

During the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Novell unvieled its Novell Pulse, a real-time social and document collaboration platform for enterprises. And the kicker? It works seamlessly with Google Wave, Novell said.

"We designed Google Wave and its open federation protocol to help people collaborate and communicate more efficiently," said Lars Rasmussen, software engineering manager for Google Wave. "We are very excited to see Novell supporting the Google Wave Federation Protocol in their innovative Novell Pulse product."

Novell Pulse gives administrators to ability to provision sign-on and permissions to both keep data secure and make it possible for workers to collaborate on documents online in real-time. Perhaps more importantly, Novell Pulse is one of the first major Wave providers.

Novell said its Pulse platform will be available in the first half of 2010, with a beta scheduled for earlier in the year.

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Posted 11/04/09 at 08:08:18 AM by Paul Lilly

It's not been a very good year for Novell employees, who never know what the next day will bring. For 100 to 130 workers out of Novell's roughly 3,900 global employees, this week brought more pink slips, CNet reports.

CNet's sources are saying that the Workgroup division saw the most layoffs, but according to Ian Bruce, Novell's public-relations director, the cuts sliced "across the company, both geographically and productwise."

Ironically enough, Linux jobs in general are doing a smashing job and are up 6 percent ince January, according to data from Dice.com. So if there's a silver lining to all this, Novell employees that were let go might not have such a rough spot finding employment elsewhere. In the meantime, they'll have several months of severance pay to tide them over, which is based on the number of years they were with the company, plus other factors.

And what about those who still have employment at Novell? The company also announced it would suspending 401(k) matching contributions.

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Posted 09/15/09 at 08:29:50 AM by Paul Lilly

In a win for both iPhone owners and .Net developers alike, Novell this week has begun offering a kit for developers to build iPhone and iPod Touch apps using Microsoft's .Net framework. The kit -- called MonoTouch 1.0 -- lets developers utilize code and libraries written for .Net and progamming languages like C#, providing developer services like garbage collection, thread management, type safety, and Web services, noted Miguel de Icaza, VP of the developer platform at Novell and leader of the Mono project.

"MonoTouch brings a new option to the table," said analyst Al Hilwa, a program director for application software at IDC. "I would say that applications closest to the metal will continue to be written in Objective-C, but where developers want to target multiple platforms, including apps that cross over between desktop and mobile, MonoTouch allows them that portability. Of course, the big win with it is that it opens the door for some 5 million .Net developers to begin to do iPhone applications."

By opening the .Net door to iPhone app development -- and a programming language more familiar to the average developer than Objective-C -- Novell anticipates new apps being developed ranging from productivity software to health care apps and games.

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Posted 02/12/09 at 01:30:00 PM by David Murphy

Novell's Mono Project released version 1.0 of Moonlight today, an open-source platform that allows Linux users to view Microsoft Silverlight-based content and applications.  Delivered as a Firefox extension, Moonlight comes alongside the release of the Microsoft Media Pack, a Firefox extension that gives Linux users access to Microsoft-endorsed media codecs. This opens up the door for playing all Silverlight-compatible media (including MP3, WMA, and WMV files).  According to Novel, Moonlight should work with all major Linux distributions, including openSUSE, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu.

But if you think that this is going to put a dent in Adobe Air's market share, you're in for a treat.  Click the jump to see just how much Adobe's runtime environment is winning the platform war against Microsoft's Silverlight!

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Posted 07/12/07 at 01:21:08 PM by Robert Strohmeyer

Dell isn't the only company offering good machines for Linux. Here are five other choices that you may not know about.

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