| Industry is lukewarm to angry about Novell/Microsoft |
Nov. 03, 2006
The Nov. 2 announcement of a mutual-assistance contract between Microsoft and Novell has been greeted by others with reactions ranging from modest hopes for interoperability improvements to great anger.
Tom Kemp, CEO of Centrify Corp., a company that specializes in products that link Unix, Linux, Mac, J2EE, and Web platforms with Microsoft Active Directory, watched the Novell/Microsoft announcement with special interest. "It seems every year they [Microsoft] have one of these Détente meetings." By addressing the "patent issue across the two vendors, [it] now looms over Red Hat vis a vis any Microsoft patents," Kemp says.
Kemp continued, it also "throws a serious light on interoperability, and raises a lot of attention to that topic which will benefit a vendor such as us who does interoperability for many platforms beyond SUSE. Microsoft will now have dedicated solutions reps focusing on [interoperability]; we will hopefully hook up with these people. Because once Microsoft starts talking about interoperability with customers, customers will have more than just SUSE, and it will lead naturally to the question of what vendor can address interoperability beyond AD, and that leads to us."
So that's all for the good, as far as Centrify is concerned, "But frankly most of this interoperability announcement is not about AD [Active Directory] interoperability (which is not actually addressed in this announcement besides a sentence about making eDirectory and AD talk better to each other, which is different from what we do) but about other technical areas (virtualization, doc formatting, etc.). I think the bigger news is in the patent area and the mutual tweaking of Red Hat."
Barry Crist, CEO of Centris Corp., a company that focuses on managing Linux systems on Windows networks, is in the happy position of being both a Microsoft and a Novell channel partner. "Today's agreement between Microsoft and Novell further strengthens the importance of interoperability for companies worldwide, and provides a formidable alliance between two of the IT industry's leading organizations that will truly help push the market forward," said Crist. "We are pleased to already call Microsoft and Novell our partners."
Jason Perlow, a system integrator, thinks the deal will be good for Novell, but not so hot for the rest of the Linux community. "At the end of the day, what this means is that SUSE will become the most desirable distribution for use in corporate environments which already have a significant investment in Microsoft infrastructure -- Active Directory, Exchange, etc."
"This is going to significantly improve SUSE and OES's (Open Enterprise Server) interoperability with legacy (and future) Microsoft server systems, but this has no impact and will be of no benefit to the Linux and open-source community as a whole, because none of these developments that Microsoft and Novell are working on are likely to see release as open source," Perlow adds. That's "because this is likely to touch only the closed source aspects of SUSE and Novell's enterprise products (eDirectory, OES, GroupWise, etc)."
Others... others are very unhappy about what this deal might do to open source. Bruce Perens, an open-source spokesperson, sniped, "This entire agreement hinges around software patenting -- monopolies on ideas that are burying the software industry in litigation -- rather than innovation. If we've learned one thing from the rapid rise of Open Source, it's that intellectual property protection -- the thing that Open Source dispenses with -- actually impedes innovation. And the Novell-Microsoft agreement stands as an additional impediment."
Kevin Carmony, CEO of Linspire Inc., goes farther. He absolutely hates the deal. "Since investing in SCO, Microsoft has wanted to find ways to use third parties to thwart open source and Linux," Carmony said.
"They would love to point their IP (intellectual property) guns directly at Linux and blow it out of the water, but that would appear too heavy handed, so they need to have one willing partner to set a price and precedence on that IP. They found that partner with Novell. Novell was the perfect partner, because they also have a large patent portfolio, so if you're going to let the 'first guy' off the hook, they're a good choice."
"So," as Perlow adds, the deal may be "good for Novell, but not good for the community."
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
Get the whole Novell/Microsoft picture here:
The Novell/Microsoft Linux Deal Reading List
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