Responding to comments on Novell-Microsoft agreement
November 7th, 2006 by Jeff Jaffe
I know this agreement has raised a lot of questions in the community, particularly around legal and procedural issues. We are working on answers to those questions. We’ve posted some of those today here. We’re continuing to work on others. Some of the questions that people have raised have been with very strong language: words like “betrayal” and “crazy”. While I understand the emotion that surrounds an agreement with Microsoft, I do encourage everyone to read the FAQs. Once you are aware of the facts you will see that we have been loyal to the principles of the open source community.
Beyond legal issues, another comment concern raised has to do with the historical record of partners who’ve worked with Microsoft. Some are arguing that anyone who signs a deal with Microsoft suffers as a consequence. In addressing this issue, I need to start by reminding everyone the source of the agreement.
For Novell, the sine qua non is the marketplace and customers. Our customers have been demanding for quite some time that we develop solutions to make Linux and Windows interoperable. This is a reflection of Linux’s growing importance and frankly, we believe that this interoperability will grow Linux’s importance further.
As we prepared our first-to-market Linux implementation of XEN, suddenly there were new opportunities. The customer demand for interoperability morphed into a stronger possibility: supporting both SLES and Windows in a virtualized environment. This would help server consolidation in a mixed shop. Moreover, as we have heard from the CIO of the City of Seattle at the press conference on Thursday, it provides a new method to bring Linux applications into an all Windows shop. With the market as our driver, we approached Microsoft to create a joint solution. With all due respect to this “historical record” of companies that partnered with Microsoft, Novell’s intention is to let the marketplace and customer needs be our driver.
Moreover, as my colleague John Dragoon says, it’s important to be informed by history, but not bound by it. Novell, as well as any other company in the industry, knows how fierce a competitor Microsoft can be. We are certain that they will compete fiercely. But that is not sufficient reason not to create solutions that customers want.