Microsoft and Novell announce collaboration
“WALTHAM, Mass.-02 Nov 2006-Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. today announced a set of broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft® products work better together. The two companies also announced an agreement to provide each other’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products. These agreements will be in place until at least 2012. Under this new model, customers will realize unprecedented choice and flexibility through improved interoperability and manageability between Windows® and Linux.” (source: Novell Press Release)
This is some interesting news (yes, it’s no news any more, but I had no time to comment it earlier) - though I am not surprised about it. Reading the “Joint letter to the Open Source Community” on the Novell website, there are a few interesting points in the agreement:
- Novell and Microsoft are releasing each company from the other’s patent portfolio. This means Microsoft won’t sue Novell for patent infringements and Novell won’t sue Microsoft.
- Virtualization. The companies will collaborate to allow Microsoft being virtualised on Linux and vice versa. Note: Microsoft and Novell are already collaborating on the Xen project along with other top-level companies Intel, RedHat and AMD.
- Office Open XML. Novell will be writing the code to allow OpenOffice to access the new Microsoft Office XML file format.
- “Under the patent agreement, customers will receive coverage for Mono, Samba, and OpenOffice as well as .NET and Windows Server.”