I for one would love to see the effect of this on http://www.distrowatch.com in the coming days. Top 2 you say eh?

Its times like this i thank there is a man named Mark Shuttleworth...

I'm not worried; there is always kubuntu in the event that Microsoft is doing this to kill off SuSE. What will be interesting is learning where Hubert Mantel goes next, and whether his former colleagues follow him.

Someone correct me here if I'm having a "old_fogie" moment. IIRC didn't Novell just take on a new Sales Manager/Director in past few months because of the poor sales/profits, etc. and they put him on a 6 month performance based lease (for lack of better terminology at the moment).

Could this not be the effect of the new Sales Manager in desparation to get the numbers up and save his position? Just a thought.

I wonder if we are going to see someone fork opensuse?

Suse was a fork of Slackware, hmmm is Mr. Pat V now covered in this?

Interesting times, interesting times.

edit: fixed word desparation.

I wouldn't totally rule it out. But the "official" word is that Novell's CEO (or is it president -- I've read so many articles on this I am going cross-eyed!) initiated contact with MS about this shortly after he got his current position earlier this year.

Anyway, I am among those that think in the long run this is going to hurt, or maybe kill Novell. I don't know whether or not it might help them in the short run.

@blackhole: yea this does sound like "separting the weakest from the herd" and then "divide and conquer" and "if your not with us then your against us" ..."while keeping your friends close and your enemies closer" all in one.

I agree what gives? MS went to their arch enemies and decided to have a cup of tea?

question is who's drinking from the poisoned cup?

I may be a Suse noob but hell from what i've seen I've come to respect linux for its robustness.
not to mention STUPENDOUS memory management which MS can only dream of

yet another good reason to switch to debian.

Hmmm....

Yes I am relatively new to linux and Im definately no expert on legal issues...

But as for me, I'm stickin with suse for the time being. Can't say that this deal will hurt Novell or make things better since there isn't enough info (for me at least) to determine what will happen. At least, if things go downhill there will always be someone else I could go to such as Red Hat or Ubuntu.

And who knows... maybe Microsoft has changed their ways... though I really doubt it.

Ubuntu may be the current popular distro amongst enthusiasts but at the moment, it does not have the same type of enterprise class apps and certifications as RHEL or SLES. These are things that take a long time to get, so if Novell loses popularity in the enterprise, then Redhat will probably make significant gains.

@reddazz:

I just saw this in my akregator:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6132211.html

IIRC debian had a big certification not too long ago as well.

What are these specifics of these certifications? What is entailed in them?

I am not sure of the specific details of these certifications, but they mostly deal with hardware support on specific platforms, security (e.g. Selinux in RHEL and Apparmour in SLES), applications tested and guaranteed to work on the distro and other stuff that could be specific to a particular industry e.g. RHEL is popular in the telecoms sector because it makes or supports apps that are specific to this industry. There is much more to this, so do some research. Some companies and government organisations will not run software thats not been certified to work with their hardware or certified for use in their computing environment.

I'm not a lawyer either, but my understanding is that, well, it depends on which happened first, the patent or the GPL'd code. If the patent was filed first and then the code was later used in GPL software, the patent would have precedence. However, if someone wrote and released GPL code, it likely couldn't be patented by someone other than the original author.

Note that I'm assuming that the patent was valid in the first place, which is a HUGE assumption. I think there is an awful lot of bad patents in software space.


As for Microsoft and Novell, this deal strikes me as having a lot of parallels to the deals SCO was trying to strike with Linux customers not too long after it launched its lawsuits. Sort of the "pay me now or pay me later after I sue you" approach. It seems to me that a central reason for Novell to sign this is to avoid lawsuits from Microsoft.

This is flat-out wrong here in America. Why? Our USPTO has been rubber-stamping patents on prior art for a couple of decades now, leaving the mess for the courts to sort out.

I, for one, want to know what impact this will have on the individual user, not the corporate user? Seems to me this whole deal is based on corporate dealings with the two OS's, which may mean the home user will be dropped down a deep dark hole! Will it bring back Voice dictation, which has been abandoned by IBM and ignored by Nuance except for Windows?

I think this is all part of a scheme to help Microsoft get rid of its competitors.

If Microsoft really cared about open source, why would they pick Novell? Not to offend any suse users, but Novell hasen't been doing that well on the business end (just look at their stock). Red Hat would have been a better choice (although I doubt Red Hat would have agreed on such a deal), or heck, why not the whole Linux community?

Because Novell isn't doing so well, Novell sees it as an oppertunity to gain business. Having a Microsoft-Novell non-aggression agreement would help bring in customers who want Windows-Linux compatibility. At least that's what they think.

However, for customers who DON'T want to deal with Microsoft (usually that's the reason why businesses move to Linux), this has a possibility to bring in business to Red Hat.

In my opinion, this is just another object for Microsoft to leech off of and attempt to make more of a profit (as if they don't make enough money already). Microsoft is hoping that Red Hat will fail and once they do, they can terminate the agreement after 5 years and beat the crap out of Novell with patent infringement and possibly other distros out there.

I will admit, I'm biased toward Red Hat, which is reflected in my opinion. However, no matter what distro you use, this will affect everybody.

Remember, Microsoft has always been anti-Linux and will continue to do so until someone smart enough accepts the fact of life.