Three Takers Named for Microsoft's Linux Support

narramissic writes "According to an article on ITworld, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank AG, and AIG Technologies have signed on for Microsoft's technical support for Novell Inc.'s Suse Enterprise Linux. This follows last month's announcement of a deal between Novell and Microsoft that Steve Ballmer described as an effort to 'bridge the divide between open-source and proprietary-source software.' None of the companies cited the price of the support certificates, nor would they say how many they were activating. Even more interesting, Credit Suisse is a brand new cusomter for Novell."

BAD Headline...

[LDAPMAN]

MS is not providing them Linux support. The sold them Novells support program.

Re:Why? - Credit Suisse in particular

[PCM2]

Since Credit Suisse is a new Novell customer, you'd think that Novell would have tried to sell them their own suppport. What am I missing?

According to Matt Asay over at InfoWorld, [infoworld.com] this story is incorrect, or at best exaggerated. He says he has it on authority that all the companies mentioned in the story had been using both Suse and Red Hat for some time.

Re:and Hubert Mantel rejoins Novell

[Jason Earl]

It's easy enough to say that, but Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank AG, and AIG Technologies are not likely to be very happy when the next version of Samba rolls out and they can't use it because it is licensed under version 3 of the GPL and Novell can't distribute GPLv3 apps and still maintain its deal with Microsoft.

Novell has a vested interest in keeping the Free Software community happy because there is no way that Novell can compete if it has to maintain its own forks of popular Free Software projects. Novell is having enough trouble trying to convince customers that a migration from Netware to SuSE Linux makes more sense than a migration from Netware to Windows. The last thing Novell needs is this sort of drama.

Re:And so it begins.

[kjart]

Ballmer: "Buy my service or you're open to liability."

I thought the whole point of the deal was that people need to buy SUSE or else they're open to liability.

Seriously though, spiritual violations of the GPL aside, if I was an IT department using both Linux and Microsoft products it would seem to make sense to use SUSE since Microsoft and Novell work together.

Re:Those swiss banks really have no scruples

[iamacat]

Godwin's law only applies when the entity in question had no connection to Nazi, not when the discussion is centered around unethical deeds of Volkswagen, IBM or Swiss banks.