Slashdot Mirror
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.
...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.
Read TFA. This agreement contains *none* of the bullshit IP limitations Novell agreed to when they sold out. In this case Red Hat and MSFT are only cooperating from a *technical* standpoint. RHT are not agreeing in any way that Linux owes MSFT any IP rights. This is amazing news and sticks a finger in the eye of Novell's sellout.
Don't worry... satan will not let this work, he doesn't do cold.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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.
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."
"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?"
Just a tip: complaining about how you were moderated will only invite undesirable moderation on your reply.
NOT THE SAME DEAL!
Jeeze.
NO SIG
How does this qualify as "neutralizing?" RHT gave up nothing. F/OSS doesn't suffer at all. This is no different from making RHEL work with any other third party closed source technology like Oracle or SAP. RHT and MSFT have simply recognized that there is a need for this interoperability, but RHT basically forced MSFT's hand and MSFT backed down. This is, if anything, a huge victory for F/OSS.
Well, okay. Humor me... read the reply again slowly, thinking to yourself that I must be writing with tongue in cheek.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Yeah, sure, cause MSFT does all of their development in the F/OSS community and gives away their technology for free just like RHT does with the Fedora Project. And MSFT has open sourced (or kept open source) all of their acquisitions like RHT did with Sistina (GFS and Cluster Suite), JBoss, Qumranet, Netscape Directory Server, Netscape Security System and others. Oh, and MSFT has paid for legal counsel to testify *against* patents in front of the EU and the US. Yeah, I can see how Red Hat is *just* like Microsoft.
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?
What are you talking about?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
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.
We are 3+ years on after the signing of the Novell/MSFT deal and there has been zero legal action by Ballmer and his cronies.
Nobody in the know were really worried about actual legal action. What people were actually worried about was that Microsoft's patent threats might be scaring away people from FOSS.
What the Novell/Microsoft deal primarily did was to lend credibility in the eyes of some people that to use many FOSS packages, you needed a patent license from Microsoft. The same applies to Linspire, Xandros, and the rest of those that actually signed patent deals with Microsoft over FOSS.
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.
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)
Here is the truth about the naming scheme.
http://www.smoogespace.com/documents/behind_the_names.html
"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?
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?
You have to subscribe to MSDN - the CDs aren't allowed to be given away (which makes sense, since you pay a vastly reduced amount for them in exchange for that tradeoff). No other legal way.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Where is the "itsatrap" tag? Is this /. or what?
Just a tip: complaining about how you were moderated will only invite undesirable moderation on your reply.
Yeah. You're suppose to do that in your initial post "I know I'll get modded down for this, but ..."
People love a martyer more than they love a whiner.
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.