In what came as a surprise to many Linux observers, Red Hat announced on the morning of February 16th that it has signed reciprocal agreements with Microsoft to enable increased interoperability for the companies' virtualization platforms.

While Red Hat, after Novell partnered with Microsoft, had talked with Microsoft in 2007 about partnering, those talks came to nothing since Red Hat would not have anything to do with Microsoft's various IP (intellectual property) claims.

Things have changed. Red Hat announced that each company will join the other's virtualization validation/certification program and will provide coordinated technical support for their mutual server virtualization customers. The object according to Red Hat's press statement is: "The reciprocal validations will allow customers to deploy heterogeneous, virtualized Red Hat and Microsoft solutions with confidence."

In a blog posting, Microsoft's general manager of virtualization, Mike Neil, wrote, "Until today there's been one barrier, not product related, that we haven't been able to overcome to meet customer and partner demand: the ability to run and support Red Hat Enterprise Linux within a guest VM on WS08 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2008. For all of those who have emailed me, my colleagues and your Microsoft account teams and partners, I'm pleased to say that today is the first big step to delivering that support."

Yes, you read that right. Microsoft is saying that they made this deal because of Microsoft customer demand to run Red Hat Linux.

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The angle seems to be that Microsoft will use their marketing muscle to encourage the customer to run a Windows Server platform and allow Red Hat as a guest. In other words, Microsoft wants the primary platform to be Microsoft with anything else virtualized. I am surprised to see that Red Hat went along with this, but Red Hat may have seen an opportunity. It also makes Red Hat look a little two-faced, since their reaction to the deal between SUSE and Microsoft was anything but complimentary (as I recall, anyway). At least they did not include IP verbiage in the recent agreement (at least that they reported).

As I said before ... a deal with the devil is still a deal with the devil. It's true they made no patent agreements like Novell, but I think it's still a bad decision. M$ has only one purpose, or goal, they will destroy or assimilate all competition.

I'm not so sure, anymore. Seems to me that MS has been forced to soften their stance against open source. CIP: I've not heard anything lately about their IP claims or threats of lawsuits. And they have yet to reveal the IP patents that OSS was allegedly breaking.

They were bluffing and they know it. The truth is quite the opposite, M$ is the one that stole code.