Microsoft & Novell make peace with Linux!!!

[JGuru]

Microsoft and Novell announced on Nov. 2, 2006 a set of broad collaboration agreements to build, market and support a series of new solutions that will make Novell and Microsoft products work better together.

Perhaps the biggest news is that Novell and Microsoft announced an agreement to provide each other's customers with patent coverage for their respective products. These agreements will be in place until at least 2012.

"They said it couldn't be done. This is a new model and a true evolution of our relationship that we think customers will immediately find compelling because it delivers practical value by bringing two of their most important platform investments closer together," said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, at the news conference in San Francisco.

"We're excited to work with Novell, whose strengths include its heritage as a mixed-source company. Resolving our patent issues enables a combined focus on virtualization and Web services management to create new opportunities for our companies and our customers," Ballmer said.

Read more about it here

[busyanuj]

yeah, read the news at neowin. they're also gonna work on a relationship such that both Microsoft Windows and Novell's SUSE install and work fine on the same PC without giving problems to users.

hmm.....i see Windows Media Codecs for linux in the near future, exclusive to Novell, as Windows Media codecs is an open standerd, but not open source though

Not to forget Windows Live stuff for linux, messenger should be ported immidiately & maybe, Win32 drivers for SuSe

[busyanuj]

Originally Posted by gxsaurav

hmm.....i see Windows Media Codecs for linux in the near future, exclusive to Novell, as Windows Media codecs is an open standerd, but not open source though

Not to forget Windows Live stuff for linux, messenger should be ported immidiately & maybe, Win32 drivers for SuSe

with porting of codecs and other stuff, SUSE might prove to be simpler for the windows-to-linux migrating ppl and also providing better compatibility.

but gx, isn't it too early to predict what will and will not happen?

[iMav]

i hope the deal doesnt fall like apple and windows did .... and collaborations are really good for the future ....

[JGuru]

@gxsaurav, 'Windows Media Codecs' are already available for Linux, though they are
not Open-source. Apple has it's own market share. But Linux will takeover it as the 2nd
most used O.S after Windows. MS can't ignore the fact the so many companies are
now moving to Linux. Some companies have both Windows & Linux installed. So working
out a strategy between MS & Novell does make sense. As it can make inter-operability
between these Operating Systems easy.

[paragkalra]

Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. today announced a set of broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft ® products work better together. The two companies also announced an agreement to provide each other's customers with patent coverage for their respective products. These agreements will be in place until at least 2012. Under this new model, customers will realize unprecedented choice and flexibility through improved interoperability and manageability between Windows ® and Linux.

READ MORE: http://discoverlinux.blogspot.com/20...x-to-work.html

According to the report, Microsoft will offer sales support of Suse Linux and will work together with Novell to develop technologies to make it easier for users to run both Suse Linux and Microsoft's Windows on their computers.

Another key point of the report is that Microsoft has agreed not to pursue any patent rights over software incorporated into Suse Linux.

Microsoft's move to embrace open source has become more apparent in recent days and today's news follows an announcement yesterday that Microsoft intends to cooperate with open source scripting language PHP specialist Zend Technologies, to enable PHP to work better with Windows.

The reported relationship between Microsoft and Novell stands in stark contrast to that of Oracle and Red Hat, where Oracle, currently a Red Hat partner, threatens to pull the rug out from under the Linux leader by starting a price war on Red Hat support.

[drsethi]

customers will now be able to run virtualized Linux on Windows or virtualized Windows on Linux
Microsoft will work with Novell and actively contribute to several open source software projects, including projects focused on Office file formats and Web services management.
Read whole story
http://www.novell.com/news/press/item.jsp?id=1196