Microsoft partners Novell: Together and Forever?
Microsft products such as Windows Server will work better with Novell now.
Its truce time in the Silicon Valley. The last few days have been something many would not have expected.
First, Microsoft collaborated with Zend for a better PHP on Windows servers. And today, they move on to collaborate with Novell, an old rival. Both the parties have agreed to collaborate on building, marketing and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft products work better together. This collaboration is in view at growing the number of companies and government agencies that rely on elements of Microsoft's Windows and Linux to run their computers. Reports suggest that around 20% of offices use both. To facilitate operating both, Microsoft has decided to collaborate with Novell. Experts believe another reason might be the phenomenon growth of Google and its Web 2.0 applications. Recently Google partnered with Sun Microsystems to help distribute OpenOffice which is very similar to Microsoft's Office. The only difference being OpenOffice is free, but not quite Microsoft Office in terms of functionality, stability and features.
Ironical, as it might sound, Microsoft's policy of being bullish about their proprietary software and code, as well as its dominance, probably caused the birth of Linux. To stand up against the evil rule, developers all around the world developed a Unix-based operating system, continuous upgrading, collaborating and contributing in building a better operating system.
The agreement clearly has some potentially important business, technical and legal implications on the market of both Microsoft and Linux. Financial terms of the arrangement weren't disclosed, which again is a trend. More and more companies are keeping out the financial details out of the press release. Microsoft wants to counter the increasingly popular Linux system, and sketched a roadmap to do that. So it won't come as a surprise anymore, if Microsoft goes to partner any other major dealing in Open Source softwares. Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, said that this agreement builds a very important intellectual-property bridge between the open source and proprietary sides of software.
But there have been sources which reveal that Linux in fact was never 'free' and that’s it actually more expensive for businesses to maintain and own as compared to Windows. Agreed, there are specific business areas that Linux works better for businesses' servers than does Windows Server, for example Web servers and Web services. On the other hand there are businesses, which have to have Windows installed on some of their servers, if not the entire domain. The reason being, most of these businesses use Microsoft Office, which has gone on to become an integral part for global business transactions. So, users have found out a unique way out, running Windows to be compatible and Linux to be efficient. That still turned out to be expensive, but this agreement would take a care of a lot more then things and will be easy on the pockets.
In hindsight, this agreement is another blow to Red Hat, which suffered a blow before by Oracle's entry into its Linux support market space. And now this agreement, which gives acceptance to Novell's Linux version.
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