I’m curious, has there been any real benefit or advantage to SLE* or openSUSE stemming from the Novell & Microsoft deal? I’m not talking about money, subscriptions, sales, etc. either.
They made the deal for better interoperability, if I recall correctly, but was that achieved and if so is it only on the SLE* products or did openSUSE benefit at all too?
And if openSUSE did benefit, is it anything that was then trickled down to the FOSS community?
I can think that maybe Mono benefited, so that one is taken. What else?
Part of what makes me ask is I know of two Windows System Administrators who, when talking with them about Linux which both are reasonable and open minded about, prefer openSUSE over others (RHEL/Fedora or Ubuntu). I know at least one perceives that there may be better interoperability and synergy between openSUSE and Windows compared to the others. Is there?
On Fri, 19 Nov 2010 18:36:01 +0000, dragonbite wrote:
> They made the deal for better interoperability, if I recall correctly,
> but was that achieved and if so is it only on the SLE* products or did
> openSUSE benefit at all too?
The benefit has been for the Linux community as a whole, at least that’s
my understanding. Novell and Microsoft co-operate an interoperability
lab that has included things like Mono (IIRC), but also document
conversion tools. I’m sure there are other things.
Jim
–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C
It was my understanding that it is more a ‘i don’t sue you and you don’t sue me’ since it is only an agreement between Novell and MS. The rest was not affected. Besides GPL got after that deal modified to prevent such agreements in the future.
I wasn’t sure if there were any actual agreements or improvements related to the deal, such as easier or more full integration with Active Directory or drivers for MS SQL server, or the like.
On Sat, 20 Nov 2010 02:06:01 +0000, yester64 wrote:
> It was my understanding that it is more a ‘i don’t sue you and you don’t
> sue me’ since it is only an agreement between Novell and MS. The rest
> was not affected. Besides GPL got after that deal modified to prevent
> such agreements in the future.
The patent protection part of the deal is quite a small part of the
overall agreement. The agreement was more about interoperability than
anything.
Of course, the patent protection part got all the press, but the press
doesn’t always report the entire story.
Jim
–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C