The pact between Microsoft and Novell is primarily aimed at the growing number of major companies and government agencies that rely on both Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft's patent-protected Windows and Novell's open-source Linux platform to run their computers.
To encourage more companies to choose Novell's open-source platform, Microsoft has promised not to file patent-rights lawsuits over any of its technology that's blended with Suse Linux.
The concession is meant to address concerns of corporate users who have been reluctant to use Linux because they feared Microsoft might retaliate with patent-infringement claims.
Surely, being a major development, there will be a lot to discuss later. Since this breaking news may seem pretty urgent, let us call this a placeholder. Watch this space. There are more details in a Reuters article.
How will this affect Canonical and Ubuntu, if at all? We shall soon find out. For the time being, here is just a video of Mark Shuttleworth talking about his historic deal with Dell.
Novell believes it can hit a pricing sweet spot with Linux on the enterprise desktop and remains in talks with top OEMs -- including Dell -- about preloading SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on PC clients.
In our experience, GNOME is so malicious - some elements of it in particular - that it would launch multiple simultaneous SLAPP campaigns not only against journalists but also their spouses
Remember all this when the media says that Microsoft became like 10 times more valuable in those 15 years (from 400 billion to 4,000 billion in alleged "worth")
In the future I'll be able to tell how, when dealing with SLAPPs from Microsofters, their Microsoft services failed me and sometimes even blocked my contacts
