Solution? Collaboration? With Novell?

The relationship between IBM and Novell has always been an interesting one. It's perplexing. IBM supported Novell's acquisition of S.u.S.E. and later attended and endorsed the deal with Microsoft, which is a big rival of IBM. Despite this, its VP of Open Source and Standards is far from fond of Mono and he sticks with Red Hat or Ubuntu on his desktop (well, a laptop in practice).

Reader Gopal has altered us about a release of Symphony and now comes this press release, which Chris Ward would probably care about because its targeted at the British crowd.

IBM, Novell Offer A Microsoft-Free Desktop To UK Users

The so-called IBM Open Collaboration Solution uses open document format, or ODF-based software, running on Suse Linux, a version of the Linux open-source operating system software owned by Novell.

Why SUSE? Could they have moved away from Red Hat (Open Client) after their changes of plans? Or are these totally separate 'solutions' (very bad word in the context of Free software)? There's room for research here because IBM did announced something around August last year (LinuxWorld) about a proprietary collaboration framework that would be built on top of SUSE. We have it somewhere in this site's archives.

Either way, it's a step in a positive direction for ODF only assuming it does not cannibalise adoption of software like OpenOffice.org, which is not proprietary.

There are other emerging threats to Microsoft Office and thus to uptake of OOXML. Among them you now have Adobe, not just Google, Zoho and their counterparts that rely more on Web standards and JavaScript. Here you have a new video that explains Adobe's plans.

CNET's Charles Cooper and Elsa Wenzel discuss the new beta release of Adobe Acrobat, which will compete with Microsoft and Google.

Adobe Flash is required in order to watch this video about Adobe. It's not so egocentric if you consider the fact that Microsoft is now publishing videos on its own Web site as Silverlight objects. It's trying to seed adoption. ⬆

"I’d be glad to help tilt lotus into into the death spiral. I could do it Friday afternoon but not Saturday. I could do it pretty much any time the following week."

--Brad Silverberg, Microsoft