"Assimilate or perish"

A month or two months ago Paula Rooney wrote about Novell/Microsoft's impact on Red Hat as far as hypervisors go. Since then, Microsoft has had the chance to introduce licensing (i.e. pay to play) for its upcoming hypervisor and it became more obvious that Microsoft's patent deals include exclusionary plans as far as virtualisation is concerned.

Paula Rooney has just published another short article to bring up all up to date.

With that, Microsoft plans to offer the first real beta of its “Viridian” virtualization hypervisor. The fully baked Viridian hypervisor — which is supposed to be compatible with Xen — is expected to ship six months after Windows server 2008. It’s unclear the extent to which this Xen compatibility will benefit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, which also is based on Xen. Seems obvious Novell’s Linux will benefit more.

This serves as further confirmation that Novell's deal with Microsoft is an anti-Red Hat alliance (among many other things). Red Hat hopes to conquer a majority of the servers (>50%) by 2015, but Microsoft recruited Novell in order to give Red Hat a hard time. "Interoperability is needed," you say? Nobody even knows for sure what real benefits are gained by ignoring open standards and, regardless, this whole thing that Microsoft and Novell call "interoperability" is not much more than a hoax and a marketing buzzword. It is used to give the impression that Red Hat will suffer from incompatibilities in the datacentre. Read this:

Let's call MS's "interoperability" campaign what it really is. Its a farce of half-hearted attempts to LOOK like they're doing something (for their Press Releases, EU, and public), but not really achieving anything substantial if they don't see or get any direct benefit from it. When it comes to standards, it must be standards made by them, that they control and lead. (Which means they control the tempo of when new features and changes are released...They'll be your friend now, simply out of convenience to them).

It's an exceptionally strong view and it validates the suspicions many people have had from the start.