Microsoft slaps another $100m on Novell interop pile

Microsoft plans to cough up $100m in additional subs to software rival Novell with the payment being made no later than 1 November, the odd couple confirmed today. MS first stumped up $240m to Novell in late 2006 as part of a broad set of biz and tech interoperability deals to make their products play nice together for the …

[Nigel Kneale]

Whither the FSF?

I guess all that chest-thumping from the FSF and followers about how MS and Novell are breaching the GPL by using these vouchers was just a load of hot air.

So, the GPL3 then...

* Software patents still a threat in certain countries regardless.

* "Tivoization" still happening.

* MS/Novell deal still blossoming.

What was the point of it again? Surely it wasn't just the FSF trying to appear relevant, was it? My that *was* a useful year of hot air, wasn't it?

[Martin Owens]

More money

Interesting.... that's all I can say. Novell have some good programmers and do a lot of important work. Why do they have to go and spoil it with these political fartings?

[Eric Van Haesendonck]

More money to fuel moonlight development?

If this means more money to fuel the development of moonlight to to the point where we have the same features on Linux as on Windows and intel mac, then it's probably a good thing.

Maybe so many people complained of not being able to watch the NBC Olympics videos because moonlight wasn't ready that MS finally realised that if they wanted a place on the web they needed to invest a lot more on Linux support and development. This is especially true now with all the EEE, acer ones and winds that are flying of the shelves with Linux preinstalled.

Then, maybe I am dreaming...

[Simpson]

holy owned subsidiary!

$340 million?

They should have just kicked in another 1.66 billion to buy the company / patents

[General Taso]

Novell + ZFS???

I heard a rumor Novell was about to commercially license ZFS from Sun - true? I would LOVE to get my hands on that... I don't care about paying royalties, I care about running my datacenter.

[Ilgaz Öcal]

moonlight can't be identical to windows version

For people hoping moonlight will get some sort of boost from MS, please be realistic.

What would be the reason to use Windows if everything (to that degree) is OK on Linux? If you look for a company really cares about your platform of choice, look to Adobe. Flash 10 is there right?

[Damien Jorgensen]

Moonlight :)

Great news, the sooner moonlight is out the better

Already have some great Silverlight in development and cant wait until the handful of users running linux also cant moan at me lol

Adobe Flash? Its shit

[David]

Another Microsoft empoyee

The comment above is obviously from a Microsoft employee or a paid shill.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Another Microsoft empoyee

The term for this type of "paid shill", as you call it, is an "astroturfer".

[Nigel Kneale]

Moonlight will never match Silverlight 100%

But then again, does Firefox support match MSIE support? OpenOffice and MSOffice? (that one's obvious) SAMBA and MS file shares? Mono and .NET?

Vice versa?

Each of those projects will live or die by their compatibility level. 100% will never be attained - the browser wars showed that.

90% might be good enough for most people. What's important is whether or not the remaining 10% could be lived without.

[Andraž Levstik]

@Damien Jorgensen

I'll still moan at you... if it can't be done easily with html+js then redo it... Not produce something that's useless... I'll ALWAYS moan about flash only or other such crap sites...

[Anonymous Coward]

@Nigel Kneale

erm i think you probably got the IE and FF ones the wrong way round, but good point on the rest

[Morten Bjoernsvik]

This is where the licenses go:

Every license of Hyper-V comes with a license for SLES10, Bundling SLES is making microsoft's virtualization effort looking better.

SLES is the only supported linux guest os on HyperV (aka Microsoft vmware clone):

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-supported-guest-os.aspx