A headline on CNET this AM begins “When hell freezes over…“. What the headline was referring to was the agreement announced by Novell and Microsoft to collaborate to help Microsoft’s Windows to work with Novell’s Suse Linux, which is open-source. This is a tremendous milestone in the acceptance and legitimization of open source as a software development methodology.
Microsoft and Novell are reported to have reached an agreement on patents that will provide each other’s customers with patent coverage. This is interesting, but even more interesting is Microsoft’s agreeing to not enforce its
patents against “individual, noncommercial Linux developers.” At this point Novell claims to be the only company that provide its customers with
a patent agreement from Microsoft.
And it doesn’t stop here, Novell and Microsoft also agreed to create a joint research lab at which they will build focus on virtualization, Web services for server management, and Microsoft Office-OpenOffice.org compatibility.
Together with Oracle’s announcement about offering support for Red Hat Linux, to me this agreement means that the world is evolving very rapidly and open source seems to be in the midst of it. I can’t help but believe this agreement is good for customers, because it means that open source and proprietary operating systems and applications can be expected to work together better as a result.
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