Paul Maritz
Photo by former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble

Summary: Mr. Maritz and his partners/colleagues from Microsoft (former Microsoft executives who run VMware now) help Ballnux and Vista 7 at the expense of GNU/Linux, so Microsoft gets paid either way (or twice, in the case of virtualisation)

A FEW days ago we covered Novell's new relationship with VMware [1, 2], which is full of Microsoft executives. This development was covered in Novell's PR blog by Ian Bruce right here and separately in here. The VAR Guy says that "VMware and Novell Counter Red Hat":

Call it a preemptive strike. When Red Hat Summit kicks off June 22, the open source company is expected to strongly promote Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) to partners and customers. Instead of sitting back on its heels, Linux rival Novell is building a stronger virtualization partnership with VMware. In short, Novell and VMware are ganging up against Red Hat. Here are the details.

As people probably know, SLES is taxed by Microsoft. It would be profitable for Microsoft to promote SUSE at Red Hat's expense. Red Hat is also a far bigger contributor to GNU/Linux than Novell is, so hurting Red Hat is a Microsoft objective.

“If people run Windows and SUSE virtualised using VMware's new deal, then Microsoft is paid twice for an operating system.”In other coinciding news, Microsoft's boosters reveal that VMware is helping migrations to Vista 7. Why is VMware helping Microsoft, which was supposed to be a rival? Could the origin of VMware's management (Microsoft) have something to do with it? One analysis of the Novell-VMware relationship says that it "fills an OS gap" and IDG resorts to exaggeration when it uses the headline "Novell back from the dead" (just because it signed the deal with VMware, which promotes Vista 7 just like Novell does [1, 2, 3, 4]). If people run Windows and SUSE virtualised using VMware's new deal, then Microsoft is paid twice for an operating system. Isn't that just perfect for Microsoft? ⬆