MOG's having fun too... http://www.clientservernews.com/ (Issue No. 666; November 6 2006 Saints Alive, Microsoft Teams with Novell on Linux)
----- That creaking sound you just heard is Red Hat swaying back and forth on the edge of the glacier-sized crevasse that has opened up in front of it. Red Hats already got Oracle making an all-out assault on its business model trying to push it into the abyss on one side by undercutting its support prices and now Microsoft will be lending its shoulder on the other side by fronting for its opposition. Oracle with its new Oracle-ized Red Hat distro and Microsoft with Novell between its teeth can now fight over the Linux bone. After leaking the skeleton of the story to the Wall Street Journal Thursday afternoon, the pair and some of their friends held a press conference Thursday evening reassuring everyone that what they were hearing was in fact true. The only thing still dividing the two companies is the private antitrust suit that Novell lodged against Microsoft on behalf of its one-time acquisition WordPerfect. Somehow that didnt manage to get resolved in the six months the companies say theyve been working out the details of their new arrangement. The credit for the détente apparently belongs to Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian, who approached Microsoft COO Kevin Turner who used to be a customer of Hovsepians back at IBM when Turner was CIO of Wal-Mart. It led to a meeting in May and the history-making accord. Hovsepian might have been inspired by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison who started musing publicly about then about having his own Linux distribution but how he couldnt force himself to buy Novell because it wasnt worth its market cap. Microsofts motivation for the deal is supposed to be customer demand and it has reportedly been under considerable pressure to interoperate with Linux better. And pairing with the weak sister sticks a nail through Red Hats shoe. Red Hat wouldnt answer the phone to comment. Under the arrangement, users will be able to run Office on Linux and Linux applications on Windows. The pair is talking about ways to improve how Office and OpenOffice share documents and say they will make translators available to improve the interoperability between OpenXML and the OpenDocument format. They are also talking about making it easier for customers to federate Microsofts Active Directory with Novells eDirectory. To appeal to the open source community, Microsoft promised to actively contribute to several open source projects. Novell and Microsoft also penned a joint letter to the open source community, presumably protecting Novells back. (See www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/openletter.html.) Hovsepian said he was impressed at how much money Microsoft is willing to spend on interoperability. Wait! There's more to the story. You're missing it unless you subscribe! This article is only a sample from our most recent edition. To learn more about subscriptions, call 516-759-7025. ----- regards, alexander. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
