our newest Ally ...Microsoft?

[deanlinkous]

or our newest enemy...Novell

What does MS get out of this?

[genesus]

What do they get? They undermine RedHat? Sounds like a sell out from SuSE...I was always uneasy with suse.

[bigtomrodney]

Novell have always been freakish about playing by the book. Even more than SUSE were back in the day. Look at the about turn on non-Free kernel modules.

I think given that Microsoft played catchup (and stole) a few Novell technologies, I think Novell are just a going to play ball this time rather than get screwed over again. I don't think Microsoft have anything to lose here. They get to strengthen one Linux brand over the others, and hence compete more directly, and also as I saw on a few of the geek news sites it could be considered a way to rival Parallels/Bootcamp on OSX. When it comes to Dual Booting Microsoft have nothing to lose.

Last and I think most importantly - Microsoft need to clean their image. They need to hold out their hand. They've already had the legal/antitrust/patent issues. A gesture like this, whether they mean it or not will benefit their 'evil' image.

[bigtomrodney]

Balmer is hilarious. I bought the other guy's speech. But Balmer just looks uneasy. Every time he mentions Linux, interoperability or cooperation he gags.

[deanlinkous]

I am afraid this is just going to be taken as a sellout and Novell trying to be popular at any cost. I hear a lot of opensuse CDs hitting the trashcan.
Is Novell giving MS the tiny wormhole it needs to wiggle in and get close to linux in order to kill it?

I don't like it, the more I think about it the more I do not like it.

[deanlinkous]

When asked if MS would do this with redhat and others they seemed to stop saying how good this was and switch to saying how good this was if you are MS and Novell and nobody else gets the deal.

"version of linux that respects our IP" interesting statement by Ballmer

[smolloy]

Neither Microsoft nor Novell are "evil". They are just companies trying to make money, so it would seem that they both think that they will benefit (financially) from this agreement.

Novell will still be bound by the GPL, so any software they have released will remain open source.

I don't see anything bad here, and I will continue to use SUSE (I didn't install it due to its stand on OSS, I installed it cos I thought it was the best operating system I have tried so far).

[fingal]

I'm uncertain, but I agree with bigtomrodney about this. I'm used to hearing the kind of corporate language used in the video link, but there are always hidden issues and subtexts. Some of us aren't one bit interested in running Windows on the desktop, so let them play out their game and see where it goes.

Neither Microsoft nor Novell are "evil". They are just companies trying to make money, so it would seem that they both think that they will benefit (financially) from this agreement.

Novell will still be bound by the GPL, so any software they have released will remain open source.

I don't see anything bad here, and I will continue to use SUSE (I didn't install it due to its stand on OSS, I installed it cos I thought it was the best operating system I have tried so far).

Yes, very sensible if I may say so ... It's probably not a bad thing. Linux can exist outside of a corporate environment anyway, but this is bound to make some ripples in the open source world for quite some time.

[bigtomrodney]

The more I watch I see that this seems to about -

• Microsoft - Money for their IP ('Compensation') and obviously publicity
• Novell - Becoming the primary choice for enterprise customers by providing an environment where the legal questions over Linux are a non issue

Seems like day to day business. I think I'm surprised by who's involved, or was at least, but I see nothing revolutionary or shocking. Just the corporate world.

Yeah Fingal, I've been busy trying to translate the corporate language. I should be heading to bed but I feel like I'm at work

[smolloy]

Maybe now it will be possible to configure the MS bootloader to recognise that there are non-Microsoft operating systems!