Riverhall wins new e-zine contract from Hobsons plc

Hobsons plc, part of the Daily Mail Group, recently placed a large contract with Riverhall to apply Riverhall's e-zine software to Hobsons client database.

Riverhall's technology, which won The Product of the Year award in Hobsons, will enable Hobsons to send out a high-quality e-zine (email magazine) with content that varies to reflect each recipient's known purchasing history and recruitment needs.

How well can you target your customers and prospects without the Riverhall e-ziner?

Rachel McClure (Hobsons Operations Manager) explained "This will enable us to target our marketing material like never before. Being able to keep our clients informed about relevant products, services and news will inevitably improve the buying experience for our clients and increase inbound enquires. Riverhall provides all the infrastructure and manages the whole process so that all Hobsons have to do is to press the Go button."

Opening rates, click-through rates and unsubscribe rates are all monitored automatically in real-time and available as a series of on-line reports.

Natalie Mudd, Hobsons UK Managing Director, said "We are highly impressed with the quality of Riverhall's software and their commitment to understanding our business needs. Their e-zine technology is fantastic stuff".

Hobsons UK is the market leader in student recruitment marketing and management, providing products and services, technology solutions and events, to corporate and educational recruiters worldwide.

If you'd like to read more about this system, please visit our products page.

Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?

Unless you're a keen follower of activities in the software world, you may be completely unaware of a war that is being fought between free open source software (FOSS) headed by the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project on one side and proprietary software dominated by Microsoft on the other.

• run the program for any desired purpose;
• redistribute copies;
• study how the program works and modify it;
• improve the program and release your improvements to the public.

If you think about this for a moment, it's rather like any device you might buy and is the basis for technical evolution.

Proprietary software, on the other hand, imposes long lists of restrictions on what you can and cannot do to the software. Specifically, you never actually own the software. What you buy is a license to use it. Furthermore, if it doesn't work, you have no right to get it fixed nor attempt to fix it yourself.

The use of the word free in free open source software confuses many people. How can you survive if you write software for free? Well, free refers to unhindered or unrestricted rather than the price. However, a lot of FOSS is available at no cost, with projects run by enthusiasts in their free time. Some high profile projects are fortunate to receive donations or support from corporations like Google, IBM, HP and Novell.

The GNU Project is a part of the Free Software Foundation

The most significant of the free software is the Linux operating system - a free alternative to Microsoft Windows. Linux was written from scratch by enthusiasts to be like the Unix operating system and has now replaced Unix in many areas.

Linux is packaged in many ways by many groups and companies and given away or sold with a support package. The two best known are perhaps Novell and Red Hat.

Much of the Internet runs on Linux - and Google, for example, is thought to run approaching 500,000 Linux servers to support its services. This, and the growing popularity of Linux as a desktop operating system, has been an obvious and considerable irritation for Microsoft. They have been paying third parties sometimes quite large amounts of money to try and taint the image of Linux or make Windows look especially favourable in comparisons.

This battle has, in recent years, started to make use of the US patent system which, unlike Europe's, allows patents on software. Microsoft and other companies have been acquiring software patents at a furious rate with the implied (but never expressed) intention of using a patent to demand royalties from an open source project.

The wolf was pacing up and down outside the house of the three little pigs.

An open source project hit with a lawsuite for patent infringement in a US court wouldn't have the funds to defend itself and would have no option but to pack up and disappear.

A couple of years ago, a company who made a reasonable living selling Unix systems was starting to feel the pinch from the mass migration to Linux. The company, called SCO, decided to sue IBM and Novell for license violation and copyright infringement. SCO probably hoped that IBM would decide it would be cheaper to pay up rather than fight.

IBM decided to fight. SCO received funding from a third party to help pay for the case and it later transpired that the third party was getting its funding ultimately from Microsoft.

The case continues but, thus far, SCO has failed to make a very good impression in the courts.

OpenOffice.org is one of the open source projects that stands to benefit from this agreement.

Many suspect that Microsoft put SCO up to the job with the promise of support as a way of testing the water without getting its feet wet.

The case did nothing to get the wolf past the door and the pigs remained safe inside. But the case still hasn't really tested the threat of software patents. We still don't know if Microsoft has a patent that it could assert over the open source world and if it did, what the outcome might be. Like an untested nuclear weapon, their patent portfolio stands over the open source world as a constant threat.

However, it's a threat that isn't earning Microsoft any money. They needed a way to capitalise on this portfolio and turn it into a real advantage.

Last Thursday a bit of news appeared that took many people by surprise and a week later is still echoing loudly. Microsoft and Novell have struck a five year deal to share technology and improve compatibility. In return for up-front payments, both parties release the other from potential patent liability and Novell will make running royalty payments to Microsoft based upon the percentage of its revenues from open source projects.

Microsoft has released Novell from any patent risk (without actually proving there was one) in exchange for a steady income from any open source project Novell can make money on.

In one deft movement, the wolf tricked the pigs into opening the door and inviting him in.

The full implications of this deal are still being understood but already legal experts are suggesting that it is violation of the GPL and Novell may have to reconsider its position.

Further Reading

• Joint letter to the Open Source Community from Novell and Microsoft.
• Groklaw - Novell Sells Out
• ZDNET Blogs - Dana Gardner