Has the Novell/Microsoft Deal Made a Difference?

willdavid writes "The deal between Microsoft and Novell was announced a little more than a year ago, and it's hard to judge what impact the deal has really had on the marketplace (if any). The two groups claim to have signed up 30 new customers (including heavyweights like Costco and Southwest Airlines), but it will still be some time before any real changes will be felt. 'Regardless of what impact the deal has triggered in the marketplace over the past year, ultimately it's about meeting market requirements. "The fact is that the vast majority of businesses do not want homogeneous IT infrastructures," Pund-IT analyst King said. "Instead, they want to be able to better and more easily manage their IT assets no matter what hardware or OS platforms they buy. Microsoft and Novell deserve congratulations on their one-year anniversary, but the needs of Linux and Windows customers are as much responsible for the partnership as the companies themselves."'"

The one video that sums

[holloway]

The one video that sums up this patent deal is this one by Eben Moglen [youtube.com]

Of course it has!

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously the deal has made a difference to Slashdot's bottom line. Things like the MS/Novell deal are perfect for getting everyone riled up into a frenzy and generating lots of page views!

Novell Honor Roll diff

[schwaang]

Over the past year several of Novell's msGNU/Linux employees have left:
Robert Love - beagle, kernel, now at Google
Joe Shaw - beagle, not at ITA Software
Crispin Cowan and the entire AppArmor team (fired en-masse)
plus others I can't remember off the top of my head

Who of note is still drawing a Novell check?
Miguel de Icaza, mono
Nat Friedman, "chief technology and strategy officer for open source" (but mighty quiet lately)
Greg Kroah-Hartman, kernel

Re:Novell Honor Roll diff

[Enderandrew]

Michael Meeks, who seems to be working predominantly on Gnome and OOo stuff. He still gets a check from Novell.

Re:Novell Honor Roll diff

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeremy Allison, a lead Samba developer, also quit Novell. I think he's at Google now. And he was outspokenly critical of the Microsoft deal and explicit about it being the reason he quit.

Thank you Jeremy! You're a role model for integrity.

Re:BLah BLah Blah more crapspeak

[killjoe]

>Ok so maybe they are the only distribution where Microsoft won't sue you for useing Samba,

Actually samba is specifically named as not being covered by the agreement. MS will sue you if you use samba even if you are using suse.

In fact if you are using suse you are at a greater risk of a lawsuit because you have established a relationship with MS at that point.

Re:paludis -s && paludis -pi everything

[G Morgan]

I'd say it's had a huge impact. A lot of anti-corporate types have bleated on about it, consistently hoping to hell that it has an impact as proof of the evilness of allowing corporations into our FOSS world. I've had a lot of headaches reading the repetitiveness.

As it is the deal is irrelevant. All it has done is proven many have a capacity to shoot themselves (and those around them) in the foot. The only real damage has been done by our own. Of course MS knew that people would go off the deep end, which is the impact they hoped for. Makes the community look immature and that has the potential to scare off pointy headed types.