I guess the folks at Novell have taken to the idea that existence for its own sake, rather than thriving through innovation is the way they want to ‘roll’.

Toward this end, the powers that be at Novell have, to the utter amazement and anger of the rest of the Linux world, cozied up to Microsoft, and made a ‘deal with the devil’ worthy of literary comparison. The company continues to deal with Microsoft under the auspices that the unholy alliance is somehow beneficial to the user base of both software bases.

The deals that have been struck on the Novell side continue to mystify many, including this author, as Open Source means exactly that - Microsoft need not make deals with any company to see what the competition is doing.  For Novell, the removal of a threat of litigation, is something that, in the long run, must be the only motivation. It does not matter that any such litigation would be fruitless for Microsoft, it is the spectre of cash mountains being wasted on legal entanglement that must force Novell here.

Sad that no one remembers the times when Novell truly owned the networking market, and the slogan around the Redmond campus was “The job is not done, until Novell won’t run’ as Microsoft was so envious of their position.

Where are those scrappy guys in red, who took on the cool blue of Microsoft, and won for so many product cycles?

By the way, Novell and Microsoft have announced a set of cross platform monitoring tools.

(here)

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Tags: microsoft, novell, tools, cross platform