Novell and Microsoft

[Will.Spencer]

In Microsoft to Support Novell's SUSE Linux, FoxNews reports on a new corporate partnership between Microsoft and Novell.

The article refers to Novell as "a leader in the open-source software movement", which I thought was a bit of a stretch.

I absolutely loved this short paragraph, which rose above the hype "The partnership's impact on consumers appears to be inconsequential except for a commitment to improve the interaction between Microsoft's top-selling suite of Office software and a free alternative known as OpenOffice."

The details were summarized in another paragraph "Under the partnership, Microsoft's sales team will offer its corporate customers a chance to license its Windows operating system as part of a package offering maintenance and support for Novell's Suse Linux platform."

And then flavored with just a dash of reality "Ballmer stressed that Microsoft will first try to convince corporate customers to use Windows exclusively before relenting to the notion of a hybrid system using Suse Linux."

To me, what this really means is that Microsoft is trying to break RedHat's almost iron grip on the enterprise Linux market.

Suse has never been a leading Linux distribution and Novell has never been a Linux leader. This gives this a slight boost in their ability to compete wth RedHat.

[peeling]

If there's one company which has learned the hard way not to get in the way of Bill Gates, it's Novell. Which is why this agreement Novell has made with Microsoft leaves me slightly sceptical about waht this means:

http://www.novell.com/linux/microsof...pensource.html

"If any of our code is found to infringe someone else's patents, we will try to find prior technology to invalidate the patents, rework the code to design around the infringement, or as a last resort remove the functionality."

Could someone please explain what exactly is going on? Microsoft pays Novell, because Novell is scared it's infringing patent rights which Microsoft has??