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Microsoft Paid Novell $356 Million in '07

Posted by timothy on from the mere-pocket-change dept.

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."

7 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. what did Novell give in return? by FudRucker · · Score: 5, Funny

    their soul?

    --
    Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
    1. Re:what did Novell give in return? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Details on how to make a stable OS!

  2. Re:Don't trust them by Idiot+with+a+gun · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:Don't trust them by slyn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".

  4. This is looking like what happened to Corel by 1mck · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  5. Re:Full Service? by negated · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well, if you do pay, make sure you wear a rubber. You don't want to pick up DRM or WGA from that skank.

    -S

  6. Re:What do the SUSE people think of this? by malkavian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.