Commavee

Microsoft and Novell are entering into a very deep relationship whereby each will provide technology and sales support for the other’s products, agree not to pursue patent claims against each others’ customers, and work to create technology that allows Suse Linux and MS Windows to better interoperate.

A Microsoft exec (didn’t catch his name, the audio was flaky) began speaking about “…patent covenants, etc.”. This sounds nasty. “We promise we won’t assert our patents against Suse Linux open source developers”.

A senior HP guy commented about “…data center interoperability”. and how because HP hardware was so prevalent, this agreement would allow customers choice, etc.
The CTO of Goldman Sachs was paraded out to justify how this was good for customers. He said “… this is good to see. I oversee complex organization, blah, blah, deliver value, yada yada, save money, etc.”

Steve Ballmer: “This is a patent-central issue. MS and Novell are still competitors. We are working technically together to interoperate in the data center. We will provide patent agreements to Suse Linux customers where MS IP is used, and we are paid . We think we are doing this in a way to that supports our business model and the open source community”.”We don’t license our IP to Linux. The cleverness is how we get protection - technical interop & patent peace of mind” for our customers. Steve is selling a veiled threat, i.e. that Microsoft won’t sue you if you use Novell Suse Enterprise Linux.

Bottom line: this is about patents, nothing else. It is speculated today that this agreement was the result of MS settling a patent infringement case Novell had earlier noted (but not yet began enforcing). Such enforcement would have been a costly process for Microsoft, in both real dollars and in PR.

I wonder why Novell chose to enter into an agreement with Microsoft like this, and then characterize it as creating “technology bridges” between Windows and Suse Linux? Companies that have deployed Suse have done so (my opinion of course) because they have made the choice not to use Windows for technology, security and licensing reasons. Where is the pent-up customer demand for this “technology bridge”?