Does this not disturb you?
 

the following has been taken from the Novell page on wikipedia
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novell )
"
Agreement with Microsoft

On 2006-11-02, Novell and Microsoft announced a joint patent agreement to cover their respective products. They also promised to work more closely together, in order to improve their software's ability to work with other software, setting up a joint research facility to do this. Both companies hope this will lead to better compatibility between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org and better virtualization techniques.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said of the deal, "This set of agreements will really help bridge the divide between open-source and proprietary source software."

The deal involves upfront payment of $348 million from Microsoft to Novell for patent cooperation and SLES subscription. Novell will pay around $40 million to Microsoft over 5 years.
"

are we forgetting that microsoft is the enemy here??

Why is Microsoft the enemy? I've always had the impression of Novell being the Microsoft of the Linux world in the first place. Not to make a statement on MS or Novell, but I don't exactly see how this is world changing.


Also, can we leave the mudslinging for the closed-source world?

1. Novell gave up nothing.

2. Microsoft paid Novell $348 million and Novell will pay $40 million over the next 5 years. Thats a positive $308 million to Novell AND Microsoft has already sold several hundred thousand dollars worth of Novell/SUSE licenses as part of the deal.

3. Microsoft may be bad but I'm not sure calling them the "enemy" is all that constructive for Linux and I've heard that term from several different sectors of the the OSS community.

In the early 1980's a geek kid with a couple of friends weren't even a "blip on the radar screen" and IBM was the Goliath of the computer world. IBM's problem was they had gotten so big they lost vision and couldn't understand anything other than what they knew, the "My way or the highway" syndrome. Along comes this geek kid and friends with a small company called Microsoft and a vision of a computer on everybody's desktop. Now fast forward 10 or so years later and IBM, while not totally out of the picture, is irrelevant as far as desktop PC operating systems are concerned and are steadily losing market share in the server market and MS is on top of the PC world. In one last desperate measure they struck a "deal with the devil" (MS) to help their disappearing market share on the fledgling PC market. MS and IBM collaborated on a new OS but, after a year or so, parted company mostly because IBM still didn't "get it". From that came OS2 and Windows 95, the rest is history.

When it's all said and done, Microsoft is a dinosaur and they know it. I actually think this agreement is a positive thing as it shows that MS is admitting defeat but is scrambling to grab hold of any foothold it can.

Just my thoughts,
MMYoung

i think that novells opfficial responce about sums it up... cant remember the link but its on the suse website somwhere...

if you dont like it that novell is trying to be more compatable with MS products, (definatly a good thing for buseness)
then go use somthing like debian!

There is a very long thread about this in Linux-News. To prevent multiple and identical discussions going on, I have closed this one.

Microsoft is not our enemy - as anyone who has been a round for a while will tell you, Linux is not here to beat Microsoft, it is here to provide an alternative to proprietary lock in. If they are anyone's enemy, it's Novell's - look at what they did to Netware back in the day.

Anyway, closed.