This outrageous “Peace of Mind” chorus continues. Last week it was Ian Bruce, Novell's PR Director, who sang “Intellectual Property Peace of Mind”. We wanted to believe that it was a slip of the tongue (saying the truth instead of lying as usual), but watch this new article about Microsoft. It features a rave from a Novell SVP: [note: emphasis is ours]

"Technical support of virtualized images is an industrywide challenge," said Roger Levy, senior vice president and general manager of open platform solutions at Novell. "Novell and Microsoft continue to collaborate to optimize bidirectional virtualization between Windows Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise with Xen. Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program provides customers with additional peace of mind when they run Windows as a guest in a validated environment such as SUSE Linux Enterprise."

Who is Novell fooling? It's too obviously about software patent, as we've already shown before. Microsoft is fostering its own version of GNU/Linux (or a Microsoft-obedient/approved GNU/Linux) with which to play 'nice' and appease antitrust regulators. But still -- it's all about software patents and thus 'Microsoft tax'.

According to this new press release from Microsoft (regarding Nikon), "Over the past two years, Microsoft has entered into similar agreements with Alpine Electronics Inc., Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd., Kenwood Corp., Kyocera Mita Corp., LG Electronics, NEC Corp., Nortel Networks, Novell Inc., Olympus Corp., Onkyo Corp., Pentax, Samsung, Seiko Epson Corp. and Victor Co. of Japan Ltd. (JVC)."

Rather than build better products, Microsoft may be developing a new business strategy. ⬆