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Microsoft and Red Hat Team Up On Virtualization
mjasay writes "For years Microsoft has insisted that open-source vendors acknowledge its patent portfolio as a precursor to interoperability discussions. Today, Microsoft shed that charade and announced an interoperability alliance with Red Hat for virtualization. The nuts-and-bolts of the agreement are somewhat pedantic, providing for Red Hat to validate Windows Server guests to be supported on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization technologies, and other technical support details. But the real crux of the agreement is what isn't there: patents. Red Hat has long held that open standards and open APIs are the key to interoperability, even as Microsoft insisted patents play a critical role in working together, and got Novell to buy in. Today, Red Hat's vision seems to have won out with an interoperability deal heavy on technical integration and light on lawyers."
another step forward for Open Source and a sign that Microsoft can adapt.
Three words for you: embrace, extend, extinguish.
Yet another proof point that MSFT and Novell are full of it about the patent agreements. Interesting that a giant like MSFT is admitting how important Red Hat is to their customer base.
First SUSE, then you.
I hope this doesn't botch CEntOS.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
...Why you would run Windows on top of Linux, given not only the stability history but also since now there are now FOSS alternatives for almost anything Windows can provide, without taking a huge hit to the "total cost of ownership".
On a lighter note, wonder what the VMware guys are thinking about all of this - it's basically the end of what has always been their niche, except for Parallels but they weren't as datacenter-ready as VMware and were established mainly to make virtualization software that can run OS/2.
Does Red Hat still name the releases after items in the game Tribes? I haven't used RH since v5.2 (shrike) If I remember correctly.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Virtualisation has been a bit of a curveball that Microsoft hasn't liked for some time. It gets people off the hardware and upgrade churn, whilst sill upgrading their real hardware, and allows people to run previous versions of Windows and applications pretty much indefinitely. It also gives the potential to outflank Windows technology by bypassing it in the virtual machine itself and surrounding Windows with non-Windows systems. Additionally, ubiquitous, freely available virtualisation is going to end up ruling, and ultimately that means an open source host running something like KVM. I suppose Microsoft had to try and do something. They want to try and get into all of this somehow, and I suppose it does mean they sell more Windows licenses and Red Hat gets to run Windows certified on their platforms which should please some people.
It's a real kick in the teeth for Novell. This is a perfectly straightforward deal of certifying each other's systems on their virtual platforms that Novell couldn't get right. In practice, Microsoft is providing no help whatsoever to Novell in running Windows on their virtual platform (which I don't think Red Hat is expecting itself really) and they sold themselves down the river by agreeing to some elaborate coupon scheme that saw SLES servers totally surrounded by installations of Windows Server and AD domains. I don't think they even realised what they'd signed up to. At least Red Hat gets some marketable press out of this without conceding anything.
does this mean a boycottredhat.com web site?
it's a Space Station!
Theres an interesting read over at the 360 blog here., which covers the debate/fight between these 3 giants quite nicely.
AG
#!/bin/perl
print STDERR "Buggy as hell.\nRFC compliance limited.\n"
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
It isn't particularly surprising that they would coordinate with Red Hat of all companies. After all, RHEL clearly exemplifies Red Hat's growing, Microsoft-emulating philosophy of "Give us the money, STFU, eat whatever dogfood we're shoveling, and love it. Oh and give us more money."
Let's see them work with the GNU Project instead. :D
"The lion and the lamb will lay down together, but the lamb won't get much sleep."
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
It gets people off the hardware and upgrade churn, whilst sill upgrading their real hardware, and allows people to run previous versions of Windows and applications pretty much indefinitely.
Does this really matter to MS though? I've worked at two types of companies. The small ones, handled licensing on a computer by computer basis, and tried to keep it all documentation manually. These folks never had any problems with forced upgrades, as they new to buy computers without the OS, and also didn't have large enough IT needs to bother with virtualisation.
The larger ones found this to be too cumbersome and risky and instead have site licenses with Microsoft, and the amount that MS gets paid has absolutely nothing to do with which computers are running which version of Windows or Word - heck at my current company even OS X, Linux and Sun machines are included in the count of computers for the license. So given that does Microsoft really care whether folks are running older versions of windows, as long as all the VM instances are being counted?
Does Red Hat still name the releases after items in the game Tribes? I haven't used RH since v5.2 (shrike) If I remember correctly.
I thought Shrike was named after the Shrike from the Hyperion novels.
You obviously don't know your tech history. Don't you know there used to be a demi-god name Sauron that forged rings of power and gave them to the peoples of Middle-Earth? Yet, in secret, he forged One Great Ring to rule them all...and in the darkness, bind them.
Whatever happened to those whopping MSDN CD collections? Does anyone know where I can get them cheap? Stuff before XP/Vista would be nice.
Mod me off-topic if you must, I just wanted to ask a question to the /. crowd, and what better place than a Microsoft story? :)
My memory might be a bit vague, but I am sure that there were other names that indicated a "Tribes" background like Spinfuser.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
"Pedantic" doesn't mean what you think it means. The agreement isn't pedantic but this post is pedantic.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Having a bit of trouble parsing this. Does this mean "validate" as in Red Hat is going to test Windows on its virtualization products or "validate" as in the VM will be responsible for ensuring that the copy of Windows is legitimate?
Is this some kind of a joke? Microsoft software can't inter-operate with different versions of the same software.
More like Microsoft is evolving.
Remember when IBM was the Microsoft of it's day? Hated and reviled just like Microsoft? Ultimately companies that create standards eventually become companies that contribute to them. The transition is never that simple of course, there's always a bunch of FUD and kicking and screaming but once reality sets in you realize that you have to co-exist. Once IBM learned this lesson they became ok guys and then Microsoft became the bad guy.
I think Microsoft has finally realized that they indeed also need to start playing nice with Linux and that it isn't going away. Is anyone really worried now about Microsoft killing open source anymore? I mean really?
Where is the "itsatrap" tag? Is this /. or what?
This is just business as usual. Red Hat probably figured that at least some Windows interop would give IT reason to virtualize on top of RH. Windows just want a presences on servers, by any means. Today virtualization is about hosting multiple OSs, but the real need behind virtualization is the incompatibility of software applications. If virtualization is really going to push computing forward, they should make it OS-free - just run Windows software without Windows. Anything else means you are still supporting Windows.
With Microsoft pushing draconian DRM (as posted today in Slashdot), I have to wonder if that relationship might somehow provide facilities to bridge that into and with the virtualized environment and server. Not only would that be a larger hit for Microsoft, Redhat would get bitch slapped. One has to always wonder of Microsoft's motivations -- it's never as it appears.