Novell vice president and also a director move on to other companies; Novell's possession of UNIX continues to raise questions

Recently, Novell Inc. has been the beneficiary of generally good news. First, Microsoft gave Novell the nod to write open source extensions to its new System Center, which signals Microsoft’s move toward greater interoperability. This will benefit all open source vendors, but Novell in particular, because these extensions are built on Novell’s ZENworks management software.

The latest move from Novell illustrates Novell's commercial inclinations

Open Source Initiative (OSI) has asked a German competition law regulator to investigate the purchase of patents owned by Novell by CPTN, a consortium led by Microsoft and including Apple, Oracle and EMC.

An accumulation of reports about Microsoft, its patent trolls, use of Novell, Red Hat's response and other trolls

Faced with a potentially large threat to free/libre and open source software from patent consortium CPTN, the two organisations have collaborated publicly for the first time. Before Christmas Open Source Initiative (OSI) wrote to the German Federal Cartel Office asking them to investigate the acquisition of Novell assets by the CPTN Group as a possibly anti-competitive move by CPTN's four members.

Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative (and Red Hat's VP of Open Source Affairs), has decided to stand up against the flagrant abuse of the term "open source" (by companies like SugarCRM, CentricCRM, and MuleSource, and OpenBravo, to shame a few). He is urging the community to use "open source" only to refer to OSI-approved licenses.

"I have come to believe that a license alone is neither a secret to success nor an absolution of sin." Michael Tiemann President of the Open Source Initiative

Open source is truly the best way to unlock the value of information technology, Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative, said at the annual Gartner Open Source Summit