From the “They said it would never happen dept” comes news today that Microsoft have signed a deal with Novell!
The deal has been summarised into three main points by Dana Gardner:
- Under a technical cooperation agreement, Novell and Microsoft will work together in three primary areas to deliver new solutions to customers: virtualization, web services management and document format compatibility.
- Under a patent cooperation agreement, Microsoft and Novell provide patent coverage for their respective customers, giving customers peace of mind regarding intellectual property issues.
- Under a business cooperation agreement, Novell and Microsoft are committing to dedicate marketing and sales resources to promote joint solutions.
The timing of this deal is curious, coming as it does only a few short days after Oracle announces its enhanced support for Linux!
Looks like a competition to see who can love Linux the most these days, doesn’t it?
hi Tom —
this is really a “divide and conquer” attack against Red Hat, I think. Still, it really illustrates that you can’t believe a word out of MS; one minute they were slagging off linux, next, they line up beside Novell 😉
What Jason said.
MS go head to head with Red Hat on the “enterprise” side of things; just like Oracle are doing, they’ll take advantage of any situation to kick Red Hat in the metaphorical head and Novell are the perfect company to do that with.
Nothing too surprising really, all just good business.
Tho it is interesting that it happened less than a month after Ray Noorda dying.