In November, 2006 Novell struck up a deal with Microsoft in which the two companies agreed to provide support to each other and promised a better interoperability between Windows and Novell’s Suse Linux. This alliance drew strong sentiments from the open source community who felt that Novell had sold them out. Now with this latest turn of events, it appears the feelings of the open source community may be justified.

Over in the UK there is a large company called HSBC, a banking firm, which has 9,500 offices and 284,000 employees in 76 countries , and has been running both Microsoft Windows and Novell Suse Enterprise editions. And it appears that a statement was made indicating the companies position that Windows is actually less expensive to operate than Linux.

“In the release, Matthew O’Neill, group head of distributed systems for HSBC Global IT operations, states that the bank’s existing Linux environment is more expensive to maintain than its Windows environment. “Some will be surprised to learn that our Windows environment has a lower total cost of ownership than our current Linux environment.” Source ZDNet UK

Which makes one wonder what influenced the bankings IT department to issues such a finding? But it gets stranger. After some in the open source community challenged this conclusion, a statement was then made that the bank uses some 50 + versions of Linux. This makes absolutely no sense.

I am sure this will add new fuel to the existing fire and it makes one wonder what is Microsoft’s real motive in it’s alliance with Novell.

Comments and opinions welcome.

Tags: microsoft, novell, windows, linux, alliance, tco