Microsoft and Novell Open Interoperability Lab

An anonymous reader writes to mention that the Microsoft and Novell Interoperability Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts opened today. The lab is supposed to allow both Novell and Microsoft developers to work together for better interoperability between SUSE and Windows Server. "Located in Cambridge, the 2,500-square-foot lab and workspace will be home to a combined team of the best and brightest Microsoft and Novell engineers focused on making Windows Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise work better together. The first priority for the lab team will be to ensure interoperability between Microsoft and Novell virtualization technologies. Additional work will include standards-based systems management, identity federation and compatibility of office document formats."

itsatrap?

I predict that this will get tagged as "itsatrap"--Microsoft has a history of joining efforts only to undermine them later. (E.g. "embrace, extend, extinguish")

Having said that, Microsoft, like many gigantic corporations, has several "personalities" in the sense that different divisions may be operating on different guiding principles that don't necessarily mesh with each other. In this case, for instance, I'm willing to believe that the MS engineers joining this interoperability effort will genuinely do good work towards making MS products work with Linux in a smart and efficient way. So, I can see a lot of good coming out of this.

Yes, we should be wary of any attempt by MS higher-ups to subvert this process and use it to break interoperability (or to make Linux look "unfit for business" or whatever)... but to some extent I'm willing to give MS another chance here.

Re:itsatrap?

Of course it's a trap. Imagine you were walking along and you saw a bear trap on the ground, with a trip wire beside it leading to a gas canister. A cage is suspended over it by a rope, and there's a sentry gun mounted nearby. You might think, "this is a trap", unless you were a Novell executive, in which case you would step into the the apparatus try to find ways to "interoperate" with it.

Re:itsatrap?

You failed to mention the money dangled over the trap.

This lab is the result of the Microsoft-Novell FUD agreement.

And at 2500 square feet, I.E., a 50x50 foot room,
the techs don't have a lot of room to interoperate.

It's a farce to appease the EU.

Re:itsatrap?

What's worse, MS really never had to do any of the work. All they had to do was document their protocols (and provide them in a GPL friendly way) so that the Samba folks (for example) could create *all* the software to make everything work. On top of that, MS could have reaped TONS of free positive publicity.

Though I am stuck using MS at work, and at home (for a couple games I like to play that aren't available/playable on any other platform), and don't really mind using the products (because, in this case, they are the right tool for the job), I very much dislike the company (in the way it does business... I'm sure at least some of the people that work there are great people otherwise...)

Not to be flippant, but wouldn't a "smart and efficient way" include a decision on the part of Microsoft to stop "not interoperating"? Seems to me that over the years they've actively and repeatedly pursued a course that was designed to maintain monopoly and thwart interoperability of any sort.

Re:itsatrap?

Yes, we should be wary of any attempt by MS higher-ups to subvert this process and use it to break interoperability (or to make Linux look "unfit for business" or whatever)... but to some extent I'm willing to give MS another chance here.

I am also hopeful. But I am also highly skeptical. Such an outcome is very possible but would go against a long standing history. At this point, it would take some extraordinary steps on Microsoft's part to demonstrate that there is no trap. I believe it is entirely possible for them to do it. After all, IBM of all entities has made such leaps. A key to their credibility is the license and projects they work with.

Microsoft has learned a lot about business from IBM in the past. Let's see if they can follow those footsteps going forward. I hope they do.

Awesome!

Now you can autospace like in Word5 or do pagebreak Wordstar style! OOXML coming to Linux!!

Ho Hum.

Tale as old as time True as it can be Barely even friends Then somebody bends Unexpectedly Just a little change Small to say the least Both a little scared Neither one prepared Beauty and the Beast...

Locked out !

Novell showed up in timely fashion but the Microsoft Engineers were mysteriously left locked out outside the building after failing to realize that the staff fridge door needed to be opened and the microwave oven set to 3:50 cook time before there card lock would work...

Ulterior motives?

I suspect that this is little more than a veiled attempt to scream "We're working on interoperability - now government, leave us the hell alone!"

Peer or puppet?

An obvious benchmark to track is the number of changes going into the Windows Server product for compatibility vs. those going into Suse Linux.

If Suse has to make all the running it will be pretty obvious who is wearing the trousers (as we say).

Re:Peer or puppet?

I would assume the changes will mostly be on the Suse side. All of the information MS needed to interoperate with Linux has been openly available for years, if MS wanted to play nicely with Linux they already would.

Do they need a lab for interoperating?

Novell professes to deal only Open Source - so why is there a necessity for this interop stuff... except for some PR stunt?

The only reason I can think of is if MS wants to share some details only with Novell and not the entire Open Source community.

Which implies no one will touch open source offerings from Novell that implemented flawed MS tchnologies - like Mono, Moonlight, Silverlight, Novell OOO, etc.

Not too much to worry about

Microsoft has been trying to create a secure OS for over a decade. They have also been trying to dominate the desktop market at every opportunity. They have not done either very well. It arguable that they dominate, but that was not done in a lab, it was done in a marketing team meeting room.

Mhmm!

Additional work will include standards-based systems management, identity federation and compatibility of office document formats.

Compatibility: Microsoft's #1 goal!

Isn't it interesting...

how tomorrow's lawsuits start?

Finally, standards compatibility!

It's about time for Microsoft to properly implement IMAP, LDAP and CalDAV in Exchance. I can't wait.

We're at phase two already?

Phase one - embrace. [linux-watch.com]

Phase two - extend. [slashdot.org]

Phase three - extinguish. [wikipedia.org]

Been good knowing you, Novell.

Write it down.

Microsoft will abandon their OS in it's current form after two more releases. Vista 20?? and Vista 202?

Then it will be MS-UNIX under the hood.

Otherwise the rest of the world is going to be on the metric system while we're still on the imperial system of Lord Gates.

Apple did it. MS will too eventually and I'll have my flying car!

Visions of the past

Woah, looking like that time that IBM and Microsoft put together a team of the best and brightest to develop the next generation of operating systems: OS/2. They got all the way to when MS released Windows 3.0, with an API that didn't match with OS/2, and then IBM was maintaining the OS/2 2.x system while Microsoft was developing NT OS/2 3.0. Then Microsoft took all of that collaborative work, and made off with it, calling it simply Windows NT.

Who is running this?

Looks like the ideal job for Miguel ;-)

Optimist here

Here's hoping they will come up with an extremely simplified AD plug-in of some sort. Yes, I know linux geeks, you can currently integrate with active directory, but it's nowhere near as simple as it should be. You can sit there and complain that it's MS's fault, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter, and the powers that be don't really care. So, here's hoping for something good coming out of this.

Not exactly a lofty space...

How many people & how much equipment are stuck in a 50' x 50' room? By comparison, the standard North American semi trailer (trailer only, not the cab) is 53 ft. 2500 ft^2 sounds large at first until you really think about it...

Hopefully, it's not an abbatoir.

Cause if it is, they're in for a world of hurt. [mzonline.com]

Standards?

...or they could just both make sure that their products implement and adhere to standards correctly.

Though given the recent OOXML ISO happenings, maybe more companies will need these labs to make their products work together...

Obligatory...

"...combined team of the best and brightest Microsoft and Novell engineers..."

Best? Brightest? Microsoft??

2500 sq ft?

2500 sq ft? that's not much of a lab...smaller than my house.
as far as office space goes, this is pathetic. think one 50'x50' room.

wow, compatability with ONE linux

you know it won't support other distros. there will be "technical roadblocks".

meet the new novell, same as the old novell. deaf, dumb and blind.

and owned by microsoft

So the idea is.....

...to make Linux desktops work with Windows servers.

Fookin' brilliant!

Priorities

``The first priority for the lab team will be to ensure interoperability between Microsoft and Novell virtualization technologies.''

That is definitely not the place I would start. First of all, I hardly think interoperability in virtualization is the most important, and secondly, as far as I know, we already _have_ interoperable virtualization.

Instead of virtualization, I would start with file formats and move to protocols from there.

Of course, neither of these would be issues if there were standards and both parties adhered to them.

NTFS

Linux can't even change (very well, yes I know there is ntfs3g) files with windows NT FileSystem. Those guys should care about those kind of things instead of virtualization IMHO :-P

Accountability

I just hope all the Novel people behind all these moves are willing to be held responsible in some non-abstract form if all this dealings with Microsoft goes south. I can't think of any way that these deals would not benefit Microsoft, however I can think of how things can go wrong enough that it affects me way over here in Fedora. So I just hope that Mr. Miguel de Icaza and company will hold themselves accountable.

should have shared space with Sun

that way, the Novell engineers can play backgammon all day with the Sun engineers since they've been busy doing little for so long already. I'd mention the Microsoft engineers but Microsoft probably doesn't send any and just hires people off the street corners, tags-em with Microsoft badges and then tells them to talk about the weather when asked a question, any question. They wouldn't know how to play backgammon or even learn it. The Sun people are most likely starving for new players.

But really, are these people really thinking anything enabling Linux to compete with Windows is going to come of this? WTF are they smoking and how long have they had their heads in the sand and/or clouds? When was the last time that has happened.

I guess there is SOMETHING different in the 'kill Linux' plans at Microsoft now. That's the embedding of Microsoft IP into OSS. So, as unusual as it is and yes, snowballs show up on Lucifer doorstep, there might actually be some little tidbits that comes out of this. Those will still likely be poison but something just might pop out of this shit hole called the Microsoft and Novell Interoperability Lab. But I wouldn't touch it. IMO.

LoB

Dead or Alive

The advantage to a lot of this is that its open source. If Novell was to be killed off as a result, we still have the code to go through choosing the pieces we want.

So if some is tainted, then through it away. People act like they don't care, but seem to. I guess in a way, who cares if Novell dies, we have their code, right? But at the same time, who is going to pick up all of the coding that will stop if they disappear?

Although, I am one of those that hopes, ad mist the flaws/bad choices, that they continue to produce some good things. XEN for example.

GPL Foils Traps

Any changes Novell makes to the Linux kernel or supporting OS code (and apps), all distributed under GPL, will be available for any other developer to use under GPL, as per the GPL.

Novell's Linux products might eventually become traps for Microsoft lockin, but the code itself need not be if included in other distros. That would be up to the other distro.

Why does any company think they won't get burned

... after hearing of Microsoft's former partnership nightmares?

Is Novell a Judas or just another plain old sucker?

Novell knows what they are doing

Remember MS stole AD from Novell and destroyed WordPerfect with nasty marketing lies. Novell knows MS can not be trusted in any way.
SUSE has only made Novell stronger. MS can never open up their huge bundled DOS or pay their taxes. If MS sent 4 engineers, then they're going to have to hire because that over half of their staff. Remember Ballmer told the EU that MS only has 500 employees and almost all of them are salesmen or attorneys.
Novell knows exactly what is going on and like most collaborations with MS today, they will take what they can get and give nothing. Can you really fit 16 engineers in cubicals and the racks in a quarter of a 7-11? Sounds like Intel Research Centers, only larger with more engineers. Someone has to answer the phone. With that number of servers, we're talking a ton of blade centers.
If it's a trap, knowing MS, it's a fire death trap to kill of a couple Novell engineers without have to pay for anti-freeze.

brave company

Many are criticising Novell. On the other hand they are brave enough to walk a important tight rope and take the flack.

notice something?

making Windows Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise work better together. The first priority for the lab team will be to ensure interoperability between Microsoft and Novell virtualization technologies.

notice, that the aim is interoperability with NOVELL, not GNU+Linux
This must mean that they're mixing SUSE with MS Patents again, which means more vendor lock-in for Novell customers...

I don't think there is any reasonable explanation, why MS is creating vendor lock-ins for Novell customers, except that they plan to buy Novell some day... (remember: Steve Ballmer saied they had found THE strategy against linux, "the enemy" - and only 7 month later, after "several months of negotiations" they made the deal with Novell.... there HAS to be something wrong about that....)

yeah yeah, what ever

The last time Microsoft worked got get interoperability with Novell products was in reality just so that people could easier upgrade from netware to windows nt. :D

Catch 22

The sad fact is for Linux to really get into more data centers and eventually corporate desktops they are going to have more interoperability with Microsoft. Microsoft is dominate in more data centers than it is not and most companies I have worked with will only allow Linux to be used in "large system applications" like Oracle and such.

The main concern is with security ( I know it sounds laughable). Not with Windows or Linux but with the current solutions for interoperability like Samba, AD technology, etc. A lot of companies will not allow those technologies in their data centers due to security policies.

Microsoft Server 2003+ is not near the security issue it was in previous versions and Linux is "known" for being more secure, but the link between them is not at this time.

Personally any system is only as secure as the people who set it up. I have done pen testing on most of the major systems and find that you can set both up to be almost just as secure as the other and the opposite is true as well. Most people here hear Windows and assume it is just as bad as it once was and has not done the research to have any true understanding and only go with the crowd. I personally prefer Linux, but have no problems with Windows other than I hate monopolies.

Why is SuSE - Windows 2008 AD integration not #1

All I want is for my Linux servers to work right away on the latest Windows 2008 AD from day 1. I want to be able to give users one account that works for their workstation authentication, resourse permissions like printer and file server access on both Windows and Linux computers, DBs be it SQL 2005 or MySQL 5, and Linux be it SSH, VNC, or the console itself. How about being able to create OUs and apply group policies to linux machines that hand things like SELinux settings, Samaba shares, printers, file permisions, services and whatnot. Now that is where they should be working. That is where all of the energy should be put, when that is working call me, until then I will be piecing shit together for sudo AD integration, using samba, winbind and hacking PAM on my RHEL box. Well while they piss their time away on crappy virtualization BS, /.ers know VMWare has over a 2 year lead, and has never failed to innovate time and time again, it has things like VMotion years ahead of MS and it supports the widest range of guest OSes. - Eric

I wonder if this means that Samba....

... Can be more than (basicly) just a file server. Over the past 3 years I've had to move a dozen customers from perfectly good, high up-time Linux servers to crap Windows 2003 servers because the applications that they relied upon moved to a database running MS SQL runtime on the server. This may, of course, backfire on the developers of those applications once MS decides to charge them a per-user fee that would greatly increase the costs of their products. Meanwhile, this simple maneuver has eliminated the possibility for many small businesses to use Linux file servers and save a crapload of money.

Instead of virtualization I would like to see them concentrate on letting Samba be a primary domain server or making MS SQL interoperate with MYSQL or PostGresSQL.

Re:Hmmm...

/* So we can get crap MS proprietary code and corrupted standards in Linux now too, huh. */

I thought that was what Wine was for?

Re:Hmmm...

We see a lot of problems here but not what you're describing. Interoperability doesn't mean putting proprietary code in Linux, but maybe variations on standards. Hasn't the Samba project been tweaking standards for years to interoperate with Windows for years, and it's still open source which is a real-world example that disproves your automatic assumption. The part about the folks in Redmond having a problem with your decisions about what OS you use .... doesn't make sense. You should clarify.