If you follow the links of commentary on commentary on commentary to the
real announcement, you can read the transcript.
Of particular not is this statement from Jeff Jaffee on the technical
aspects:
On the technology collaboration there are three primary areas of
technology collaboration. First and foremost is virtualization. Ron
already talked about the fact that we're working together on a joint
solution, the joint solution essentially means if you want to run your
Linux workloads virtualized on top of Windows, we're going to create a
joint solution which accomplishes that. SLES on Windows is going to be
part of a joint solution, and comparably, if it's a Linux shop, but you
have Windows applications that you'd like to run virtualized under Linux,
we're going to work on that, as well.
Just the way it's phrased, I think the deal is heavily weighted in MS
favour. Like Steven, I don't really see how much win Novell can get on
interoperability other than documents, formats which anyone can license
from MS if they want to pay money.
The deal is a big win for MS in two ways. MS salesmen can now offer a
solution to customers that will still sell a Windows license when they
insist they have to run Linux for certain apps. More importantly, like the
investment in Corel a few years ago, having arms length token competition
keeps the anti-trust police away from MS. Something they particularly need
in Suse's home turf, Europe.
I don't really see any particular benefits for users or developers on either
platform. In terms of patent issues in the commentary, that's really a non-
issue. A patent suit would take years in court and probably wouldn't help
anyone regardless of the outcome.
As Steven said, if IBM did it, that would be something to worry about. They
hold the other half of the patented protocols that are involved with Windows
file sharing.
Received on Mon Nov 6 15:53:55 2006
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