Microsoft and Novell partnership
Bright future for Linux?
Depends on what you value the most.
From what I read, MS and Novell plan to develop their own additions to OpenOffice, Samba and Mono. OO and Mono are LGPL, so MS and Novell can safely build their own proprietary technology and dynamically link with OO and Mono source code given by the community. I guess they can easily put the entire OO into a bunch of .so files and load them dynamically from their own office suite. They can also integrate those with their own proprietary format in new versions of MS Office. That way MS Office and their Linux version of office suite would be 100% compatible. However, if some non-SuSE distribution would want to use such office suite they would have to pay royalties.
As you can see, MS idea is not to kill Linux, as they have obviously seen it is impossible. So, they decided to integrate those few important software that are main revenue source for MS, and make Linux users pay one way or another.
Soon, MS won't be telling: don't use Linux. They embrace Linux users, as it means more money for their office suite - which is the main source of revenue (unlike cheap OS).
As for Samba, which is GPL, MS could easily change the protocol in it's Windows systems (perhaps it is already done in Vista???) and patent the new protocol, effectivelly pushing Samba team out. Then, they'll provide their own version of Samba, possibly writing it from scratch (as MS has a lot of programmers, it isn't a problem) which would use their proprietary and patented protocol. Once again, Linux users would have 100% compatibility, but at a price.
Looks like MS is playing really smart this time.
posted by Randy White @ 10:24
3 Comments:
I've heard a rumor that, after the Vista is finally finished, Microsoft will no longer be an active player on the operating systems scene (as weird as it can be). Rumor says that they will be oriented mainly on web services and business solutions. When you look at the rapid development of virtualization techniques (Microsoft Virtual Machine, Xen, Vmware...) and this Microsoft and Novel pact, some of that rumors actually make sense! Who knows, maybe in future we will use some linux & windows hybrids, a system with linux kernel which uses virtualization to run Microsoft's proprietary software. Sounds to futuristic - both today's software and hardware are more than capable of doing that? We indeed live in interesting time :)
P.S. It seems that you cannot post a comment with your account once you switch to blogger-beta account (and I did that last week) :((
I love and contribute to open source projects,but i think this partnership scare me.
I think we are going back to enslavement era!... i think so.
It looks like blogs that didn't switch to new accounts didn't get e-mail notifications for comments. Sorry about that.
Today I migrated to new blogger, so hopefully everything will be ok.
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