Paul Maritz
Photo by former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble

Summary: VMware, which is run by former Microsoft executives with Novell relationships (to promote Microsoft-taxed SLES), is taking a shot at Red Hat, the flag bearer of GNU/Linux in business

SEVERAL weeks ago we explained why Novell's deal with VMware was somewhat of an attack on Red Hat (not just because of KVM, which Red Hat owns). Well, based on several new articles, Red Hat's CEO acknowledges there is a problem (here too):

However, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst sees virtualization software vendor VMware as "our largest competitor," he said in an interview after his keynote at the Red Hat Summit, being held this week in Boston.

According to another source, VMware is trying to buy the 'engine' behind Ruby on Rails, whose founder dislikes Microsoft for good reasons.

Reportely. VMware has been in talks to buy EngineYard, a provider of Ruby on Rails technologies and services, including Ruby hosting. EngineYard also provides support for JRuby, after chief maintainers Charles Nutter and Thomas Ebeno joined from the once mighty Sun Microsystems.

Microsoft has been trying to take greater control of Ruby [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15]. It's hard to ignore the fact that VMware is filled with ex-Microsoft executives in the top management and we already know what it did with Zimbra. VMware's parent company promotes Microsoft Exchange. ⬆