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.

Novell happily considers itself and even describes itself as a Microsoft partner, which possibly makes it part of that self-serving channel or the Microsoft ecosystem. Just watch the recent story from China for enlightening examples

Novell is acting as though it is Microsoft's committer in circles where Microsoft is rightly distrusted and OpenSUSE still ought to escape

Statements from Microsoft that are already confirmed to be incorrect FUD keep surfacing through the Microsoft-faithful crowd

BOTH MICROSOFT and Novell will have a role or at least some impact at a formal, national level. Mundie's involvement is a subject that we covered yesterday [1, 2], but we wrote not as much about Schmidt's impact. Sun, Google, and Novell are all places where he worked, so his affinity towards particular companies cannot be ignored.

Novell's dependence on Microsoft increases. Novell is not only giving up on tools which compete against Microsoft’s [1, 2, 3, 4]. It actively embraces Microsoft’s vision of technology and helps Microsoft in a variety of different ways.

Andrew Tridgell has published a patch that could make the Linux implementation of the FAT filesystem impervious to Microsoft patent claims of the kind that forced a settlement from TomTom. The patch alters the VFAT code so that it does not generate both short and long filenames.

Novell is fed by Microsoft and it also serves Microsoft, this latest situation being a possible new example (Microsoft and Novell try to hijack OOO.)

Novell's role in Microsoft PR revisited, along with forgotten offences. OSBC 2009 had ended a short while ago and it was probably a little harsh to focus only on Microsoft's presence over there. Nonetheless, this is part of a pattern and it's clearly damaging to GNU/Linux and Free software.