Microsoft and Novell Open Interoperability Lab 113
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Agreed. Microsoft is a many-headed beast, and not all of them are evil. Hopefully this is a start of Microsoft's turning from the dark side. (But then, with Darth Ballmer at the helm, Microsoft can only be so good.)
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Re:itsatrap? (Score:5, Funny)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Yeah, but it's in Cambridge where software engineers are used to be tucked into tiny cubicles!
But then again, it being Cambridge, the land of the FSF, MS is walking into pretty hostile territory. How many MIT hacks will be pulled on that office is beyond my guess...
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The 2,500-square-foot lab was completed in July and includes about 80 servers that are running Intel Corp. dual- and quad-core chips, as well as dual-core chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
So far, the lab has four engineers on staff, with another four to be hired by the end of the year, Hanrahan said. Other engineers from Microsoft and Novell facilities around the world will also work in the lab, he said.
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the techs don't have a lot of room to interoperate.
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No research needed (Score:3, Interesting)
It's actually not that difficult. Have most of your apps spit out strings of text in some documentable (or, ideally, document*ed) format and basically voila!
What's difficult is having interoperability without actually having it. In fact, I suspect they could research that until doomsday.
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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.
Um, no. They will do work towards making Linux work with MS products. Whether this work will be good or not remains to be seen, but their track record does not speak well for them. No doubt much of this work will be closed-source proprietary software designed to run on Linux. And I have no doubts that one of their first jobs will be porting WGA to Linux.
Glad it's not on my Resume (Score:1, Interesting)
Good luck to the "top" engineers who end up working there. You are a pariah, possibly to both camps.
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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.
Then a
Re:itsatrap? (Score:4, Interesting)
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...)
Re:itsatrap? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
In all seriousness though (Score:2)
Ho Hum. (Score:1, Funny)
Locked out ! (Score:1, Funny)
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The publisher could not be verified. Are you sure you want to try to interoperate with this company?
Name: Microsoft
Publisher: Unknown Publisher
Type: convicted monopolist
From: Redmond, WA
(( Run )) ( Cancel )
[x] Always ask before selling out to this company
Ulterior motives? (Score:2, Informative)
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I thought that was what Wine was for?
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WINE actually provide a useful service that helps third party applications that were originally only developed for Windows to migrate to Linux. The project that does what you warn about is Mono, which encourages Linux developers to adopt proprietary Sue You Later frameworks without thinking about it. And Mono, co-incidentally enough, is the one with the close, close ties to Novell. I wouldn't touch SuSE with a 50m CAT5e cable, right now.
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Nobody said Microsoft doesn't try to force Windows so there's no need to go looking in caves :). Yes companies do tend to force their products because that's kind of how they make money. You probably won't see a company promoting somebody else's product in spite of its own. Look at any company and its product. A company will tend to sell its product whether your personally like it or not. You're basically describing business as u
Peer or puppet? (Score:5, Interesting)
If Suse has to make all the running it will be pretty obvious who is wearing the trousers (as we say).
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Re:Peer or puppet? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Do they need a lab for interoperating? (Score:1, Flamebait)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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I mean, there is historical precedent (Windows' TCP/IP stack), less effort required to "play nice" w/ FOSS-friendly corps, and they'd (for once) have something more secure than what they've been issuing forth in the OS market.
Mhmm! (Score:2, Funny)
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I suspect that they have learned the lesson from SOAP that having an interoperable standard does not necessarily decrease business. It increases it if the standard complexity is above a certain threshold.
So some of them have seen the light of more revenue on the horizon already. It is a matter of the rest of the company following suit.
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Isn't it interesting... (Score:4, Funny)
Insightful (Score:2)
Finally, standards compatibility! (Score:3, Funny)
We're at phase two already? (Score:4, Interesting)
Phase one - embrace. [linux-watch.com]
Phase two - extend. [slashdot.org]
Phase three - extinguish. [wikipedia.org]
Been good knowing you, Novell.
Write it down. (Score:1, Funny)
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!
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Of course if Windows went away and it was all UNIX, perhaps a new generation of developers would get sick of it and create a new and better OS.
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MS customers are not so forgiving. Reimplementing Windows with a Unix core would be an enormous undertaking that is unlikely to be a cash-positive move for MS. Besides, most of the complexity of Windows wouldn't go away by c
Visions of the past (Score:2)
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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.
There is more... As OS/2 had perfect, better than real Windows compatibility, nobody bothered to code natively for OS/2.
.app files. That is true even for game
Same goes for its excellent DOS support which was ahead of any DOS that time. Its DOS support was doing amazing things. That 32bit shell even having Arexx scripting ended up being a DOS emulator.
Result? We all know it. That is why I am afraid of WINE, Cider stuff started to popup on Apple OS X. OS X deserves a lot better than Windows crap packaged in
Who is running this? (Score:5, Funny)
Optimist here (Score:2)
Not exactly a lofty space... (Score:1)
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I guess we were supposed to read "2500" and think, ooohh what a large number... and not translate it into real terms.
Hopefully, it's not an abbatoir. (Score:2)
Standards? (Score:2)
Though given the recent OOXML ISO happenings, maybe more companies will need these labs to make their products work together...
Obligatory... (Score:2, Informative)
Best? Brightest? Microsoft??
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2500 sq ft? (Score:1, Redundant)
as far as office space goes, this is pathetic. think one 50'x50' room.
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wow, compatability with ONE linux (Score:1)
meet the new novell, same as the old novell. deaf, dumb and blind.
and owned by microsoft
So the idea is..... (Score:1)
Fookin' brilliant!
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Worst of both worlds!
Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Of course we do (several varieties of it, even), but Microsoft doesn't. They see that virtualizing Linux is going to be big business; their goal is make SUSE on Windows using Microsoft's virtualization solution the 'premiere' way to do that.
My theory at least. Anyhow, I don't expect anything good to come out of this 'interoperable virtualization' issue except for Microsoft (and possibly Novell).
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NTFS (Score:2)
Accountability (Score:2)
should have shared space with Sun (Score:2)
But really, are thes
Dead or Alive (Score:2, Insightful)
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 con
GPL Foils Traps (Score:2)
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.
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Whilst that might be true for applications, for the kernel it's a different matter. We could find ourselves faced with two or more almost-the-same-but-diffe
Why does any company think they won't get burned (Score:1)
Is Novell a Judas or just another plain old sucker?
Re:Why does any company think they won't get burne (Score:2)
Darth Ballmer: If it could be turned to the Dark Side of the Patent...
Darth Gates: Yes, Novell would make a powerful ally. Can it be done?
Darth Ballmer: Novell will turn, or it will be destroyed.
Re:Why does any company think they won't get burne (Score:2)
Is Novell a Judas or just another plain old sucker?
Probably just in financial dire straights and taking the short-term cash injection from Microsoft to put off its inevitable demise.
Novell knows what they are doing (Score:1)
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 M
brave company (Score:3)
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It does take a lot of bravery to assume that Novell will be the first software company to emerge successfully from a partnership with Microsoft.
notice something? (Score:2, Interesting)
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 the
yeah yeah, what ever (Score:2)
Catch 22 (Score:1)
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,
Why is SuSE - Windows 2008 AD integration not #1 (Score:1)
I wonder if this means that Samba.... (Score:2)