Comparison between Sun's vocation and Novell's. WHEN Novell had approached Microsoft (not the other way around), it soon invented software patents as a business model for offering added value to open source software. Sam Dean, inspired by Matt Asay, compares the strategy of Sun to that of Novell and he has hardly any good things to say

Novell is shaking up its business and partner strategy in Europe. The VAR Guy reached out to Novell Chief Marketing Officer (and Channel Chief) John Dragoon for his thoughts. Here's the scoop.

Novell's strategy has a lot to do with Mono and Moonlight, based on the technical officer

Give Novell credit. Rather than slamming The VAR Guy for a particularly harsh blog post about the software company, Novell reached out to him and engaged in a healthy dialog. During a lengthy telephone chat, Novell Senior VP and Chief Marketing Officer John Dragoon (pictured) discussed the company’s business performance and strategy. Here’s a recap of the conversation, and some updated reactions from The VAR Guy.

In its annual report for the fiscal year ended October 31, 2006, Novell expressed concerns over how the new version of the GPL may affect their business. Microsoft might stop distributing SUSE coupons if the GPL version 3 interferes with their agreement or puts Microsoft's patents at risk, ultimately causing Novell's business and operating results to be adversely affected.

I've openly wondered -- again and again -- whether Novell will ever connect the dots between SUSE Linux and the company's other product groups. A potential answer to that question has emerged. It involves Novell’s Intelligent Workload Management (IWM) strategy, which melds cloud and virtualization opportunities with Novell’s solutions. Here’s the scoop.

We recently showed how Microsoft is ’stealing’ from Novell’s GroupWise. Is this the company that Novell is serving in so many ways? Why? Has Novell forgotten the past so quickly? Examples from the news of Novell problems and loss of business to Microsoft.

Assuming that Novell's buyer will only care about immediate profit, the OpenSUSE community should start considering independent life outside Novell

Companies like Red Hat and Novell base a lot of their Linux business model on providing support to their big enterprise customers.  This model has been very successful, but no one has applied this, or any other, business model to consumer desktop Linux with great success.