Category Archives: Novell

Smackdown, finally: Novell owns Unix

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In throwing out SCO’s claim that it owns the copyrights to Unix, the judge essentially eviscerated the whole ridiculous case, including the charges against IBM and others.  It makes for sweet reading, and Joe LaSala got a nice quote in the John Markoff article in the Times today:  “The court’s ruling has cut out the core of SCO’s case and, as a result, eliminates SCO’s threat to the Linux community based upon allegations of copyright infringement of Unix,” said Joe LaSala, Novell’s senior vice president and general counsel.

Linux kernel development

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From Novell’s own Greg Kroah-Hartman, a presentation on Linux Kernel Development [pdf], subtitled “How, What, How Fast, and Who.” It’s full of juicy information, including this breakdown of contributors:

  1. Unknown Individuals 33.2%
  2. Red Hat 11.8%
  3. Novell 9.7%
  4. Linux Foundation 8.1%
  5. IBM 7.9%
  6. Intel 4.3%
  7. “Amateurs” 3.9%
  8. SGI 2.2%
  9. MIPS 1.5%
  10. HP 1.3%

Of course, this raises as many questions as it answers; who are these unknown indviduals who contribute fully a third of the changes to the Linux kernel?

Xen: merged

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Via OSNews: Xen virtualization has been merged into the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel.  This is a hot topic at the moment, if you’ll pardon the pun, because of all the physical — space and energy — problems that real-world data centers are running into today.  Virtualization of computing/processing power — like the virtualization of storage and so forth — is one answer to this problem.  Virtualization, though, creates other problems, especially including the management of virtualized machines.  In some ways, managing VMs is harder than managing actual boxes; it has been a major stumbling block in the adoption of processor virtualization, one which Novell’s Orchestrator product neatly solves.

(Yes, graybeards, I know that virtualization has been around on mainframes and other platforms since time immemorial.)