Microsoft And Novell Make A Deal
Microsoft And Novell Make A Deal
November 3, 2006: In news that has shocked the industry across the world, Novell and Microsoft have jointly announced a landmark interoperability deal allowing both the Linux and Windows platforms to work together.
It’s a deal that makes friends of once sworn enemies: Microsoft who has traditionally been opposed to open source and Novell, who just two years ago filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft and received US$536 million in the process.
But Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO now says he is excited to work with Novell and talked up Novell’s strengths as a mixed-source company. It’s the globe’s leading seller of patent-protected software alongside the champion of the open-source movement.
The two companies have jointly announced a set of broad agreements to build and support solutions to assist the Microsoft and Novell products in working together. Even more surprising, the pair will jointly market solutions and provide patent coverage to each others’ customers for their respective products – an agreement that will last at least until 2012.
In a move both companies say will boost significant benefits for customers, Microsoft will officially recommend SUSE Linux Enterprise for customers who want both Windows and Linux solutions.
Novell says Steve Ballmer is extremely passionate and ‘genuine’ in his support for the joint agreement. “He spoke about how it will help our customers leverage both the Microsoft Windows platform as well as our SUSE Linux Enterprise platform,” Ron Hovsepian, CEO for Novell wrote in a press release. “He mentioned how it will give customers like you choice and flexibility in building their technology environment.”
Brad Smith, senior vice president and general counsel of Microsoft says one of the biggest challenges of the partnership was the patent issues involved. “We had to be as creative as we could be to find out how to build a bridge, an intellectual property bridge, between proprietary and open source software.”
A key part of the agreement is the development of a research facility for Microsoft and Novell engineers to work together to build and test new solutions to support the technologies. The research will focus on three key technical areas; virtualisation, web services and document compatibility.
The initial response from the open source community was positive. Stuart Cohen, CEO of Open Source Development Lab labelled the announcement a ‘milestone’ and expressed his appreciation for the role of Novell in bridging the gap between Microsoft and the open source community. “By choosing a course of co-operation, Microsoft acknowledges the critical role that open source plays today in an ienterprise IT infrastructure,” he said. “We are pleased to see these two companies collaborating to further diminish the legal threat posed to developers and customers by patent assertions”