Microsoft Paid Novell $356 Million in '07

Anonymous writes "At the end of this piece at Channelweb.com, it's reported that Microsoft paid Novell $355.6 million last year as part of their 'interoperability' deal. It's no small wonder, then, that Novell executives are saying the deal has been a huge success so far."

Comments

Customers?

[Weaselmancer]

It'd be interesting to see if the money they got from their customers in '07 equals or exceeds that number.

If it doesn't, I'd think they have a somewhat skewed and short-sighted definition of success. Me, I'd call it getting paid off.

Don't trust them

[nighty5]

It illustrates that Novell can no longer be trusted to push Linux technologies beyond that which is offered by Microsoft.

Re:Don't trust them

[Idiot with a gun]

Personally, I didn't trust them the moment they made the deal with Microsoft. It showed more of an interest towards their own pocket books than the software or their users. Unlike Red Hat, which promised to protect their customers, and change any infringing code, and Canonical, which I believe offered the same for *buntu users.

Re:Don't trust them

[DMoylan]

> Don't trust them

i actually pity them. been partners of any sort with ms just seems to be the kiss of death.

Re:Don't trust them

[slyn]

They've done a lot of the work towards the FOSS drivers for the ATI cards, including recently releasing V1.10 of the RadeonHD adding support for the 3850 and 3870, as well as release 10.3 of OpenSuse, and (AFAIK) have continued business as usual since the MSFT agreement.

Novell at the moment may not be the most faithful to the GNU ideals at the moment, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that Novell "can no longer be trusted".

This is looking like what happened to Corel

[1mck]

Years ago Corel was developing WordPerfect for Linux, and the along come Microsoft, and gave them a huge sum of cash to cease all development of WP for Linux, and now look at where they are now...Novell is going to suddenly realize years down the road that they really did sell out, and there's no going back, and it's obvious that the owners of the company don't give 2 shits, so now Microsoft will find some way to weasel Linux from the world. Yay for interoperability...whatever the hell that means, and what is involved!

Re:What do the SUSE people think of this?

[malkavian]

Actually, I think it's a whole non-issue at the moment, until the waters are less muddy, and only time will tell that.
For interoperability, Novell SLES is pretty pleasant. I work for the NHS in the UK, and moving hospitals away from being almost pure Windows is not an easy thing. SLES fills a lot of niches that Windows currently fills (file server, database platform et.), for a fraction of the cost. One of the things I'm working on is to make greater use of SLES. And if you point to Red Hat, and say "Well, they do the same product, except they're more idealistic", Red Hat don't have a current deal with the NHS (where Novell do, and provide fantastic pricing).
Couple that with eDirectory, Identity Manager etc. and you've got a lovely heterogenous infrastructure to play with.
I like Novell. Yes, they took money from the Beast. However, the Beast is currently being watched very carefully, and has a lot of other (probably unexpected) battles to fight.
I tend to run Ubuntu and Debian for home use (and quick build servers/firewalls). But in business, you need to bring a lot of other factors in. And for something the size of the NHS, alas, you can't always choose the idealistic route. Pragmatism and practicality are large factors.
As long as SLES keeps on being a great product, performing well, and being a really low cost product (for a commercially supported enterprise grade OS), I'll keep on using it.

Re:what did Novell give in return?

[jafoc]

I can't help but think of the claims by Novell's Miguel de Icaza that "OOXML is a superb standard" and Novell's further support for OOXML. (For example, they joined the national standardization committee in Switzerland and probably also other countries and voted in favor of OOXML without having previously participated in the technical discussion of the specification's serious shortcomings.)

Re:Two ways to control corporations

[Znork]

"patents and copyrights are what entice entrepreneurs to make improvements"

So, let me tell you about this opensource thing...

"our protection of intellectual property is one of the elements that has made us the prosperous society that we are"

Our 'protection' of intellectual 'property' has kept us as far less prosperous society than we could have been.

Competition is what drives innovation and the evolution of technology. Handing out intellectual monopolies slows that innovation and evolution. Protecting someone from competition makes them slow and inefficient; to realize exactly how inefficient you just need to look at the former Soviet state-run businesses, or other state-protected monopolies in the west.

Just imagine the world we'd be living in today, had technology been allowed to develop competetively. Imagine the medicines we'd have if 'protected' pharmacorps couldnt spend 80% of their revenue on administration and marketing. Imagine the operating systems we'd have if most of the resources spent on them didnt get tied up in a single company that cant even produce a product better than their last one after six years (nevermind being outevolved by a rag-tag bunch of companies and individuals working in a _competetive segment_ with _unprotected_ software).

Patents and copyrights are a blight upon the economy and upon innovation.