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Why Novell is Bad for Linux: Reason #100 (Virtualisationovell-only)

Novell's deal with Microsoft may be good for Novell in some senses, but it is also very bad to Novell's suppliers, which is turn will cost it dearly. Novell alienated itself by sidling with Microsoft against other Linux companies, notable Red Hat. We have already seen Novell helping Microsoft gain some ground in supercomputers, 'advertising' Vista and so on.

“Another good example of Novell's harmful role involved virtualisation.”Another good example of Novell's harmful role involved virtualisation. We have seen this coming for a long time and mentioned Hyper-V's discrimination factor in the past [1, 2]. To an extent, XenSource (Citrix) plays a similar role [1, 2].

Have a look at this new short article/blog post, which says more about how things have developed with the arrival of Hyper-V's Release Candidate:

Hyper-V Leaves Linux Out In The Cold



[...]

Wednesday, Microsoft said Hyper-V beta for Windows Server 2008 is feature complete. Included in the list of operating systems supported are Windows Server 2003 SP2, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1, Windows Vista SP1 (x86), and Windows XP SP3 (x86). See John Fontana's article for more details about the Hyper-V RC announcement.

Though I'm anxious for Hyper-V to be released, especially the standalone version (which is not what this RC announcement was about), I'm very disappointed in Hyper-V's lack of support for Linux.

No offense to SUSE Enterprise Server crowd, but only providing SUSE support in Hyper-V is a huge mistake. By not supporting Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, and BSD, Microsoft is telling us Hyper-V is a Microsoft only technology. More Mt. Redmond, Microsoft center of the universe thinking. That's disappointing.


Might this be a proper time to complain to the EU? It is abundantly clear, as we foresaw before, that Microsoft will try to pressure rivals into unwanted deals, using exclusion as an extortion card.

Over a similar type of abuse, in the past few weeks we saw Opera and Phoenix complaining, resulting in limited success. In both cases, the EU pushed Microsoft into a complaince route, although it was not entirely reasonable. In Google's case (almost a year ago), it was far from reasonable because the US Department of Justice is far too close to Microsoft. TrueCrypt might be next to complain.

To get an idea of how close Microsoft and Novell are gradually becoming, read this additional short report.

However, Hyper-V's Linux support is limited to SUSE. That's no surprise, given Microsoft's relationship with Novell, but more users have Red Hat, and other distributions. They won't be able to use Microsoft's virtualisation technology - though to be fair, they will probably be more interested in VMWare or Red Hat's own virtualisation technology.

"We're pleased with Hyper-V," says Justin Steinman, director of Linux marketing at Novell. "SUSE Linux is a first class guest on Microsoft Windows Server." Microsoft's Steve Ballmer has shown SUSE Linux running as a guest, which was "cool", said Steinman.


Love is in the air. Can you smell it too?

Novell and Microsoft piss on GNU/Linux codebase



In other semi-related news, yet another set of reports about Eclipse reveals a mixed bag. It covers Sam Ramji's talk. There is skepticism from Eclipse developers who are being wooed by Microsoft. We warned about it before [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. On the face of it, Microsoft will continue to stick its fingers in the Eclipse pie.

The Eclipse Foundation looks destined to remain a mistress to Microsoft and Sun Microsystems - while the platform is married to IBM.


Be very careful. And remember the danger: Embrace, extend, and extenguish. People began chattering about Microsoft's C# in Eclipse.

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