On 11/2/06, Basil Chupin <blchupin@tpg.com.au> wrote:
Goodbye, SUSE!
As far as I am concerned, this is only a cover-up for the ultimate takeover of Novell. (Didn't I already suggest this many months ago?) Novell is in financial trouble, and has been for some time, isn't it?
I could not disagree more. It may be that MS is trying to kill off competition by favoring Novell for now. It will be interesting 2 or 3 years from now, to see whether Novell was able to use it as a spring board. I don't know how many of you had a chance to listen to the press conference as I did: this deal occured as a result of Ron Hovsepian approaching a long-time friend who now works at Microsoft (I think the COO .. can't remember the name). This occured in April. He basically said: "I know we are competitors now, but look at this from a customer perspective. When you were a customer, if there were 2 applications that were not playing well together, you would talk to both vendors and say ... make it work. That's what we are hearing, from our customers. We need to find a way to make this happen". By May, the top level folks were talking. The agreement has both technological and legal/business components. The technology parts include primarily: 1)virtualization. SUSE will work on Windows, and be supported by Novell. Windows will work on SUSE and will be supported by Novell (this includes applications, not just bare os -- at least that is how I took it). 2)directory and web application management will be integrated ... I assume this is the tomcat/mono/java/asp.net stuff, including possibly apache and IIS management tools, being able to access and monitor and manage "the other guys" stuff. 3)document formats .. the 2 companies will collaborate closely on office suite and doc format integtation issues, such that complete solutions built around one offering will not "lock out" the other guys tools. The legal/business aspects of the agreement include: marketing and engineering dollars from both sides. Hovsepian said he was "impressed" by the dollars and dev resources that MS was willing to commit to this. Also, MS has agreed to push 70,000 SUSE server licences per year. (the hp spokesman volunteered that HP will be happy to assist with the hardware ....). Also, each company will pay to the other, for the use and sale of respective technology. Probably the biggest aspect of this is the IP/patent aggreements. Both sides have agreed to hold each other harmless, and to in effect indemnify the end users at the same time. They were clear to indicate that MS is NOT licensing tech to SUSE, because that legally cannot occur given the constraints of the GPL that applies to most SUSE code. All parties stressed that it was this aspect that was the hardest to come to aggreement on, and that it required the most creativity and commitment. It also has the biggest payoff long term, because it enabled the tech collaboration that customers have demanded, while keeping to the letter of GPL and ensuring that independant developers will not have to worry about their work being misused or exposing them to liability in any way. It sounded like this deal will be exclusive ... Ballmer said several times "we will encourage customers to use the one linux verison that offers them true interoperability options, as well as legal protections". This is very very good news for Novell, I think. Not so great for RedHat, and is most likely a competitive spur for VMware ... But both sides were adamant that they remain competitors. Ballemer said "when I go into Goldman Sachs I'm going to say 'get rid of that linux stuff' and when Novell goes into Goldman they are going to say 'here is how to get rid of that windows stuff'. But, at the end of the day, when Goldman still has both platforms, our two companies will gaurantee that our stuff will work together, to allow Goldman to work on Goldman business, rather than having to spend time working on integration issues" (obviously these quotes are very loose paraphrases ....) Peter