Microsoft, Novell Reach Agreement on Linux

[daddygeek]

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2050694,00.asp

Novell, Microsoft Ink Linux Partnership
http://www.betanews.com/article/Nove...hip/1162510036

Microsoft to recommend Suse Linux, sorta
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/11/03/mi...linux_windows/


I do not know what to say:5headache:
Recap

OpenOffice will also play a role in the agreement. Microsoft and Novell will work to ensure documents created in the free productivity suite can seamlessly work in Office 2007

Microsoft is providing a covenant not to assert its patent rights against customers of SUSE Linux

Novell will make ongoing royalty payments to Microsoft for all open source products it ships.

The Microsoft-Novell pact, which will run until at least 2012

The agreement focuses on three main technological areas: virtualization to allow Linux to run on Windows machines and vice versa, Web services to help customers with a mix of Linux and Windows products, and document format compatibility to allow users to share documents.

Microsoft has officially jumped on the Linux bandwagon

[Brucifer]

One could read multiple things into those comments......... such as M$ won't assert it's patent rights against customers of suse linux... what about the rest of the distros? Or Novell making royalty payments to M$ ????? For what? For not inforcing patent rights?

For some reason the thing about a wolf in sheep's clothing..............

[Strongbow]

I totally agree with Brucifer regarding "the wolf in sheep's clothing"!

Hasn't this happened all before???

Netware/Microsoft compatible agreement! - Where's Netware now?
Netscape/Microsoft compatible agreement! - Where's Netscape now?
IBM PC-DOS/Microsoft right to use agreement! - MS-DOS became the standard!

In fact the only one I can think of where Microsoft hasn't (yet) crushed it's competition through an agreement is with Sun and the right to use Sun JAVA! They did try to create their own JVM but failed!

[NeoGen]

In fact the only one I can think of where Microsoft hasn't (yet) crushed it's competition through an agreement is with Sun and the right to use Sun JAVA! They did try to create their own JVM but failed!

One thing I've noticed at my Uni is that a few years ago it was dedicated to Java programming... but in the past couple of years they've switched to .NET languages and ASP...
If this happens at other Uni's, I guess that it may take a bit more than usual, but the .NET marketing campaign will probably push Java away, as the new generation will learn .NET instead of Java.

[Brucifer]

Been out reading around on a lot of other forums. And as others are doing, it looks like it's time for me to uninstall Suse and move to another distro. I've bought my last copy of Suse by whatever name.

[AMDave]

They probably realized that Xen is a real threat to them and SuSE is the first to manifest this in the marketplace. Novell signed this agreement much too soon.