Summary: A new sample of Microsoft/Novell overlaps

EARLIER TODAY we identified a Microsoft-sponsored Web site showing intersections with Novell, as follows.

I recently spoke with Johan Rosius from Novell Teaming, who shared with me a related example of a significant return on an enterprise 2.0 investment.

This is very minor, but nonetheless it's part of a pattern. Looking at the news, for example, we find that a prominent Novell employee is too busy in his ZDNet blog bashing Apple but never ever Microsoft, which is a friend of his employer (Novell and ZDNet). This too is part of a pattern. Joe Brockmeier is publicly bashing Apple and Google quite a lot, but Microsoft never does any wrongs in his eyes. But anyway, he writes about other topics, such as what IBM-Sun might mean to his employer. In the sister site, CNET, a former Novell employee represents a face of "open source" (of course not Free software) and explains why IBM won't buy Novell but merely use it instead.

I've heard some people wonder why, with all of IBM's interest in Linux, "Why are they buying Sun, when they could buy Novell?" The reason is simple. IBM has never had, and continues to have no interest in being a Linux distributor. IBM Global Services, which delivers integration, support, and service to Linux customers, is how IBM makes it billions from Linux. IBM is perfectly happy to let Red Hat, Canonical,and all the rest have the distribution and first-line support business.

With Novell's hand in the code, Novell products like Mono continue treading towards KDE [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], which gets another new dose.

Support for C# events added to the C# bindings.

Mary Jo Foley is among those who are promoting Microsoft vapourware (Silver Lie 3.0) at this very moment and it's clear to see what role Novell plays in this:

I asked Becker about Microsoft’s plans to support Silverlight 3 on Linux clients. He said if and when that support happens, it will most likely come from Novell, which created the Silverlight port to Linux, known as Moonlight.

Not a word about the implications. ⬆