Microsoft-Novell Walk Under the Moonlight
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Podcast. Overnight, Microsoft and Novell made three announcements related to their now two-year-old interoperability agreement, including the soon-to-release beta of the Silverlight for Linux port. |
Sometimes answers aren't easy when marketing spokespeople are programmed to talk marketing speak. After interviewing Microsoft and Novell spokespeople for 20 minutes, I still can't say what real world problems the companies' interoperability agreement solves. Can you, after listening to the podcast?
In the podcast, I speak with Sanjay Sidhu, who is Microsoft's director of marketing and business development for the Microsoft-Novell Partnership, and Susan Heystee, Novell's general manager for Global Strategic Alliances. I don't mean to belittle either Sanjay or Susan; they agreed to the podcast with just a few hours notice. They were friendly and understanding when I had to restart the recording because of a technical glitch.
Background: Microsoft and Novell announced their interoperability partnership on Nov. 2, 2006. The agreement is supposed to help businesses with mixed Linux and Windows environments to better operate and manage them. I see the primary benefits differently. Microsoft helps Novell sell more copies of SuSe Linux, while Microsoft lives with Linux on terms the company can accept.
Host: Joe Wilcox
Guests: Sanjay Sidhu and Susan Heystee
Length: 00:20:48
I may not have gotten the interoperability answers I wanted, but the participants got to give their marketing spiels, so somebody should be happy. Sanjay lets loose about 13 minutes into the podcast for about 3 minutes.
As for the actual announcements, quick recap—I removed the customer wins as insignificant in meaningful substance:
- Advanced Management Pack for SuSe Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (Coming first half 2009)
- Moonlight, the open-source Linux port of Silverlight ("Upcoming" as beta plug-in for Firefox)
- SuSe Enterprise Server Subscription program with two-year support for enterprises migrating from other Linux distributions.
I'm scratching my baldy head wondering why Microsoft and Novell chose today—17 days after their two-year interoperability partnership anniversary—to announce products that won't ship for a long time. Where's the momentum if the products aren't here yet?
[Please send your tips or rumors to watchtips at live.com].
Comments (6)
For some reason Monnlight never worked on my Ubuntu 8.10. Silverlight is another Microsoft lock despite being marketed as cross-browser, cross-platform and cross-device platform.
Posted by crux | November 19, 2008 2:26 AM
Its an irrelevant package, that has little interest even on the platform its intended to lock you in on.
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The USA website who hosted the olympics with it, have dropped it. As are many others, they just dont want it.
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For UKr's like myself, the BBC site wont touch it and infact are working on a project with a Linux distro. The BBCplay site is very good, and doesnt require MS's efforts.
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Again, another little scheme that MS has made alot of noise about, but its not going anywhere (IMO).
Posted by Goblin | November 19, 2008 3:52 AM
Moonlight is not a "port". It is a re-implementation attempting to be (somewhat) compatible. I don't believe it's even fully open source. In this area of MSFT patent FUD a reporter must be very precise.
Posted by patrick | November 19, 2008 9:35 AM
Thats a good point Patrick. Im not sure myself if Moonlight is "open" or not, nor the input MS has in it (if any)
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I think the best advice is just to keep it off a system altogether.
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Anything with a MS/Novell flavour IMO is tainted, so Im not interested.
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I feel a little sorry for Novell, if they hadnt weakened so quickly to MS and formed "the deal", Im sure Novells distro would be where Canonical's is now.
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As it is you can now see the side-effects of a deal with MS when you base your business off open source.
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@Joe. When you said "I'm scratching my baldy head wondering why Microsoft and Novell chose today—17 days after their two-year interoperability partnership anniversary—to announce products that won't ship for a long time. Where's the momentum if the products aren't here yet?"
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To me the answer is simple, MS is looking for any news that puts it in a more favourable light than it currently is. Maybe MS is trying to "cash in" on the Linux increase? Afterall they have penguins in their adverts and now they are releasing news in connection with open source software, maybe MS's logo will be "Life without proprietary" next year, that is, until they have something else they want to flog you.
Posted by Goblin | November 19, 2008 10:41 AM
Roy of BoycottNovell.com is too modest to post links to his own page on this site, however I really think the article on his site in relation to this is well worth a read for any user who uses Linux and is considering installing this "software" on their system.
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http://boycottnovell.com/2008/11/19/microsoft-moonlight-fan/
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Food for thought.
Posted by Goblin | November 20, 2008 6:58 AM
Its all very well having a runtime which is supposedly cross platform, but if developers are led to use non-cross-platform libraries then the Silverlight apps they make are going to be Windows only.
The major culprit is using video codecs which are windows only, unless developers are testing on all platforms from the beginning, its very easy to make single platform apps even with a 'standard' cross-platform toolkit.
Just look at the OOXML 'standard' - it is littered with patented and Windows-only formats. It is impossible to implement fully, but the promise not to sue only covers complete implementations. Nice...
Posted by billybob | November 20, 2008 9:03 AM