[Leaplist] MS and Novel join forces -- no, they just renewed their partnership ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

ray wrote:
> is this a good thing?  on the surface i can see benefit from having a
> company as powerful as MS backing Linux via Novell, but is this really
> what is happening?

No.  This is the same thing as the Microsoft-Sun alliance.  It's not
anything "new."  It's merely a renewed partnership that
Microsoft-Novell had before, just like Microsoft-Sun.  Microsoft is
not supporting Solaris any more than Linux or any non-Windows
platform, it just has enterprise customers who run Linux, like
Solaris, it cannot ignore.

The markets and products change, but the entities still have to work
together.  At some point, both companies decide that patents are going
to prevent their systems from working, and they knock down the walls
from around their developers.  To not do so kills much
interoperability.  E.g., eDirectory and ADS interoperability is still
a major, major service cash cow for Microsoft Gold Partners (I know
this first-hand, repeatedly so).

The side-effect is that select business relationships are added.
Microsoft has partners asking for Linux compatibility and even
Microsoft *STILL* itself outsources a lot of its Internet capability
to Aikami who runs Linux heavily (with BSD and Solaris less).    At
the same time, Novell needs a refresh of Windows APIs, especially for
Vista.  Novell is still heavily Windows-client focused (unlike Red
Hat, which caters to UNIX clients far more), and do not work with
Microsoft shoots itself in the foot.

As far as Red Hat, people have been talking about their demise for
some time now.  I get slack from all sorts of distro bigots and the
fact that everyone "complains" about Red Hat a partially due to
rhetoric and not so much technical (or the technical is often without
realizing what RHEL and/or Fedora Core are, based on non-enterprise
solutions).  That includes some Novell-SuSE advocates, although I find
the actual SuSE engineers are "level headed" (as are the Red Hat ones
too).

Red Hat takes heavily away from Sun and that is not going to stop
anytime soon.  In fact, if Red Hat's market cap should slip
signficiantly, the smartest thing Sun could and should do is buy Red
Hat (although I don't know if they could afford them even if it
slipped quite a bit).  Other than on Java (which is a partnership
issue), Sun (unlike IBM, but like HP) "just gets" GPL.  SuSE doesn't
have nearly as much of that share, and is more focused on Windows
clients or thin services (e.g., atop of Big Iron).

This new cross-license doesn't surprise me one bit.  In fact, I'm
surprised it didn't happen sooner.