Microsoft

Nov 11 2009   7:10PM GMT

Novell and Microsoft pact reaches third year mark

Posted by: Leah Rosin
Novell, SUSE Linux, Microsoft, open source, Red Hat, interoperability, Virtualization

This post was contributed to by Pam Derringer, News Writer

On the third anniversary of the 2006 Microsoft-Novell pact, Novell is touting 475 customers who have bought SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates from Microsoft under the settlement. Under the controversial agreement, Novell agreed to give Microsoft either a percentage of all its Linux revenue through 2011 or a minimum of $40 million. Microsoft, in turn, bought $240 million in SUSE certificates that it could then resell to customers with mixed environments who wanted to buy new Windows servers and purchase Linux machines. In addition, Microsoft gave Novell another $108 million as a “balancing payment” in connection with the patent part of the deal.

This joint marketing initiative worked so well in the first two years that Microsoft committed to buying up to an additional $100 million in SUSE certificates in the summer of 2008. To date, Microsoft has only actually purchased an additional $25 million. In fact, SUSE certificate sales boomed so much in 2007 that they were cited as a major factor in SUSE’s three-point market share gain that year vs. Red Hat.

A look at the numbers after three years
While interoperability was the stated goal of the partnership, financial factors were the key motivator for both companies.

“While technical interoperability was the announced basis for the Microsoft relationship, Novell did the deal because it needed to jump start its Linux subscription sales,” said Bill Claybrook, founder of New River Marketing Research, a firm specializing in Linux. “In November 2006, Novell was on the tail end of four or five consecutive quarters of flat SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription sales. At the same time, Red Hat was reporting year over year increases in revenue and subscription sales of 30% - 40%, and Red Hat was already way ahead of Novell in subscriptions sold and in revenue from subscriptions.”
Continued »

Feb 27 2009   5:14PM GMT

Is Microsoft suit against TomTom first shot in Linux war?

Posted by: Leah Rosin
Linux, Microsoft, patents, IP, TomTom, open source

Is Microsoft’s suit filed against GPS device maker TomTom the first shot in a larger Linux war? That was the question being asked yesterday after news spread that Microsoft had filed a patent-infringement suit in US District Court for the Western District of Washington against TomTom NV and Tom Tom Inc. The Linux community went into a tizzy in 2007 over Microsoft’s patent tirade, which indicated that open source software violated 235 of the company’s patents. At the time, experts explained that this move by Microsoft could just be some arm twisting to create more Novell-like deals. Yesterday’s announcement reignited some of that concern, but left some scratching their heads after what appeared to be a series of recent moves by Microsoft to work with the open-source community. These include last week’s announcement of a Microsoft interoperability agreement with Red Hat, sans patent pledges.

So what gives? According to Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s corporate vice president deputy general counsel for intellectual property, this case is not about open-source, specifically. In an interview with Todd Bishop at TechFlash, he explained:

… open-source software is not the focal point of this action. The case against TomTom involves infringement of Microsoft patents by TomTom devices that employ both proprietary and open-source, and as I said, out of the eight patents, five of them relate to proprietary software infringement.

Some cool-headed folks within the Linux community also spoke out yesterday, urging others to “calm down.” One of these was the executive director of the Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin, who posted a blog post that began with just that phrase. Other open-source leaders were leery, as was indicated in a CNET news piece on the suit.

It’s too early to tell, but from what I have seen, all the Linux community can do is watch and learn, and as Zemlin says, “hope for the best, and prepare for the worst.”

Feb 11 2009   6:46PM GMT

Red Hat proves value can be derived from open source

Posted by: Leah Rosin
Red Hat, Linux, JBoss.org, Fedora 10, open source, Novell SUSE 11, Microsoft, Virtualization, interoperability

This week, Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat has issued a “State of the Union at Red Hat” message that at first glance appeared to be little more than a cute press pitch, well-timed with the State of the Union address from the President of the United States, Barack Obama. Whitehurst weaves in the common theme of open source being a “value” during the down economy, talks up acquisitions from 2008, and gives a shout-out to Linux community members JBoss.org and Fedora.

But things start to get interesting at point number six in his list, and I honestly would have missed this if I hadn’t seen the comments of The VAR Guy, who stated “Red Hat is destroying the old myth that there’s no money in open source.”

The VAR Guy’s declaration was based on Whitehurst’s statement with this information about the success of the company:

Weathering the economic storm. Red Hat has continued to execute well in what is a pretty competitive economic climate. In fiscal year 2008, Red Hat became the first open source vendor to cross the $500 million mark in revenues and we’ve also maintained 27 consecutive quarters of sequential growth in total revenue.

Impressive. Or is it? The VAR Guy points out that Microsoft earned 120 times as much during the same year.

Red Hat may be leading in the Linux distribution race thus far, but Novell is charging ahead, on the cusp of releasing SUSE 11, with greater virtualization and interoperability promised. With Novell’s partnership with Microsoft, the company is making gains in the market.

As businesses try to bounce back from the downturn in the economy, open source may be an even more attractive alternative. What do you think? Is Red Hat’s $500 million a true achievement, or is it just an attempt to give credence to open source? Share your thoughts.

Oct 21 2008   3:21PM GMT

American Idol vs. Britney: Why open source will prevail, Red Hat says

Posted by: Pam Derringer
Microsoft Windows, Linux, desktops, Red Hat, Microsoft, Linux versus Windows, Linux blogs and news, Open source applications, TechTarget Blogs

Red Hat CEO and supersalesman Jim Whitehurst sure knows how to keep things simple. In yet another global tour pitching Red Hat, Whitehurst compared the open source development model to American Idol, the TV show that propelled country singer Carrie Underwood to instant fame, and the proprietary software model to Microsoft’s much-scorned Vista operating system and Britney Spears.

According to a ZDNet.co.uk article, Whitehurst told a Singapore business forum that companies using open source software address their major software pain points right away and can then share the results quickly with the rest of the community. Proprietary software companies, on the other hand, are slowed down by the need to solicit user feedback and then fix the problems through a top-down, planned development cycle. That model, proclaimed Whitehurst, is on the decline, he said.

Look at the recording industry, Whitehurst said. They spend far less to market American Idol winners, whose appeal has been proven up front than they do on the multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns for Britney Spears that lack a similar advance-popularity litmus test, Whitehurst said.

Whitehurst’s analogy couldn’t be clearer (which assumes that the typical Asian businessman is familiar with American Idol and is old enough to remember records). Anybody else still got any old 45s kicking around?

Sep 9 2008   7:12PM GMT

Red Hat mystifies with Qumranet purchase

Posted by: Pam Derringer
Linux, Red Hat, Microsoft, Linux desktops, Linux blogs and news, Open source applications, TechTarget Blogs

Less than a week after Red Hat Inc.’s surprise $107 million purchase of Qumranet Inc., I remain mystified by this acquisition. Qumranet is the Israeli-based creator of the KVM open source hypervisor, which is incorporated into the Linux kernel; SolidIce virtual desktop, which Qumranet launched earlier this year but has yet to gain serious traction, and Spice, a super-fast communications protocol for transmitting bandwidth-heavy multimedia content at high speed that other vendors currently can’t match.
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The first person to raise questions about this buy to me was George Weiss, executive vice president of Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc., who said this dual hypervisor strategy would make life more difficult for Red Hat customers, who would have to buy a management console to control the two hypervisors, Xen, which is already in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5, and KVM, which will be added in subsequent versions.

Burton Group analysts Chris Wolf and Richard Jones pointed out that KVM enters a crowded market late in the game. Despite a solid architecture, KVM is still immature and lacks the momentum and multi-vendor support of more-established Xen, Wolf said. To be the No. 2 virtualization vendor based on KVM, Red Hat must end its isolation from the Microsoft camp and attain certification under Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program so its hypervisor will be optimized for Microsoft guests, he said.

KVM needs the support of another big vendor or two, added Jones. The Qumranet acquisition will pull Red Hat in the direction of desktop virtualization while Xen will continue to dominate the server market, he predicted.

Tech blogger Jason Perlow said Red Hat told him that it plans to open source the Spice protocol and other components of the SolidIce desktop virtualization. If so, Red Hat will have positioned itself as a solid competitor to VMware and Citrix’s desktop and server virtualization, assuming an attractive pricing model, Perlow predicted. “At the end of the day, it’s not about raw technical merit. It’s about how well the vendor markets the solution and how palatable it is to end users,” he said.

Daniel Kusnetzky, principal analyst of Osprey, Fl.-based Kusnetzky Group, who recently counted Qumranet as a client, raised another rationale for Red Hat’s purchase of Qumranet: control over the hypervisor. Red Hat lost leverage over Xen when Xen was bought by Citrix; this acquisition gives Red Hat control over KVM, he said. Good point.

The bottom line: Maybe it’s just that I’m a frugal New England Yankee, but I wouldn’t pay $107 million for a giveaway hypervisor and a promising-but-wannabe desktop virtualization product. Especially since desktop virtualization is not yet ready for mainstream adoption since it shifts storage to the data center, which is more costly. This acquisition is all the more surprising since Red Hat hasn’t done much with the desktop to date. Kusnetzky may have hit the bull’s eye on Red Hat’s motivation but Wolf also is correct that it’s time for Red Hat to mend fences with Microsoft if it wants to be relevant to the overwhelming majority of the computing universe, desktop or server.

Jul 9 2008   6:49PM GMT

Harvard Law professor outlines OS evolution

Posted by: Caroline Hunter
Windows, Linux, videos, Microsoft, Linux versus Windows, Legal, licensing issues, Linux blogs and news, GPL issues

According to Yochai Benkler, Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, open source software is part of a shift to an economy driven by de-centralized non-market transactions. What the heck does that mean?

Yochai could probably tell you better himself, but it means that commerce is moving away from its home in the marketplace. The power to purchase is taking the place of the authority of institutions.

It means that a basic kindergarten tenet is coming into its own in our economy: sharing. The freedom to socially share is undermining Microsoft, the government and most centralized authorities’ ability to determine the course of events and money. Listen to Professor Benkler above to determine whether you agree.

May 27 2008   12:39PM GMT

Novell hopping with news, but it’s not all good

Posted by: Pam Derringer
Enterprise applications for Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Red Hat, Microsoft, SUSE/Novell, Linux blogs and news, Open source applications, TechTarget Blogs

Recently, Novell Inc. has been the beneficiary of generally good news. First, Microsoft gave Novell the nod to write open source extensions to its new System Center, which signals Microsoft’s move toward greater interoperability. This will benefit all open source vendors, but Novell in particular, because these extensions are built on Novell’s ZENworks management software. Score one for Novell. Second, Novell’s SUSE Linux price cut may target Red Hat Inc.’s mainframe aspirations and make it more difficult for Red Hat to challenge SUSE’s already overwhelming lead in the open source mainframe market and creates financial incentives for businesses to consider a move to mainframes.

But the news wasn’t all good for Novell: Astrum Inc., a Texas startup now headed by two former Novell employees, for example, filed a suit against Novell for breach of contract in connection with the development of a mini-operating system appliance. The scuttlebutt is that Novell has dumped the partners in favor of a more established company.

According to blogger Roy Schestowitz of BoycottNovell.com, if Novell back-stabs its close partners like Astrum, its code-base partners like Ubuntu and Red Hat should expect similar treatment. In fact, Novell’s interoperability pact with Microsoft, which jeopardizes free software, indicates that Novell has already done so, he warned. Novell “gets no sympathy from me,” Schestowitz wrote.

Meanwhile, Red Hat launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 of its flagship operating system and Novell issued a service pack with beefed-up virtualization, clustering and other features, both on the same day.

With all this action, Linux fans may just have to keep their iPhones and BlackBerrys at the ready to keep up with all the news updates this summer.

Apr 17 2008   10:48AM GMT

Microsoft Vista vs. Linux desktops: An IT pro sounds off

Posted by: Caroline Hunter
Microsoft, Linux versus Windows, Linux blogs and news, Updates and upgrades

The thought of moving to Microsoft Vista has put many Windows users into a panic, writes Ubuntu Linux user and IT pro Fred Marsico, the chief technology officer of Quantum Mechanics R&D in Corvallis, Ore., in this guest blog post.

In trade mags and blogs, I have read about the Vista-versus-Linux issue, and it’s now my turn to say something.

Since December, I have used Ubuntu Desktop. Aside from the fact that I have no virus warnings, no malware and no bots downloading themselves, it has been business as usual. I use Open Office and have no problems with reading and writing MS Office documents. My old Windows Me PC would not let me do that with a new version of MS Office, and of course that meant upgrading to XP as a prerequisite before installing Office. Total cost would have been about $300.

My wife has an older HP notebook running Windows XP Media Center. I chuckle as she reboots each time she gets an update or adds and removes programs. I have been running nonstop with only one required restart for a patch to the Linux kernel.

I read all of these horror stories about Vista on the blogs and comments on many sites about the same. I also see many intentionally derogatory messages posted by Windows users on the open source sites. According to them, Linux is for geeks; “normal” people don’t need to constantly tweak settings and such, as Windows is “automated.” This means that all of Windows software installs without much intervention.

In an honest comparison, it is true that Linux would greatly benefit from an Install Shield application that would make software installs and removal ubiquitous, but I also remember when Windows users complained about the same things.

Another point to ponder is that most of the back-end computers handling banking and ATMs are running Linux. And regarding security, if the banks trust Linux, we should have no problem doing so too.

With faster and multiple-core processors used today, I would have thought that Vista would have been written from the ground up with optimization in mind. With the hefty hardware requirements, it seems Vista is now the most bloated version Microsoft has rolled out to date. Just because I have 2 GB DDR RAM and a 100 GB HDD does not mean that I want my OS to hog most of them. I thought it would make having several applications running concurrently faster, and cause less hangs and crashes.

With the end of the software’s service life rapidly approaching, Windows XP users are panicked. They dread the thought of moving to Vista . Many are starting to look at the Mac OS or Linux as an alternative. Perhaps Bill Gates stepped down because he could foretell the future, and it begins to look like Microsoft is faltering.

With the state of affairs as it is, software developers should move to open source in droves. They can still write proprietary code, and can still sell it at retailers and online.

They just won’t have to pay homage to Microsoft. Monopoly software is dead; long live open source!

Apr 9 2008   2:54PM GMT

Perens: The co-optation of patents, standards threaten IT innovation

Posted by: Caroline Hunter
Enterprise applications for Linux, Microsoft, Linux versus Windows, Legal, licensing issues, open standards, Administration, interoperability and integration

The success of open source software (OSS) has software giants like Microsoft running scared, OSS pioneer Bruce Perens says. Although most IT shops today use OSS such as Nagios, Samba, Apache and other programs, the open source community is still in a vulnerable spot, as software vendors use their patents to gain unfair market advantage and even take control of OSS products and standards.

I talked with Perens recently, and our topic was what IT managers need to know and do about the state of open source software. Perens says that IT managers are in the best position to lobby proprietary software vendors to protect and not attack the OSS community. IT shops are those vendors’ customers, after all, and have some clout; whereas, the large majority of open source developers — mostly self-employed or volunteers — are poorly equipped to stand up to major corporations that are trying to grab ownership of OSS.

Proprietary software vendors are both co-opting open source and, as stealthily as possible, trying to destroy OSS with software patent threats. If proprietary software vendors succeed in stymieing OSS development, technology innovation will slow down, and interoperability in heterogeneous environments will be difficult, if not impossible, to attain.

Protecting OSS will help IT organizations retain the ability “to purchase software without becoming tied to that [software vendor] for other software” to manage or complement it, Perens told me.

The protection of open standards should also be on IT pros’ agenda. Once a proprietary software vendor gets hold of rights to software standards, there are few obstacles to that vendor expanding those rights. Perens urges IT organizations to support the International Standards Organization (ISO). Established to govern the process of patent distribution, ISO working to adapt standards to the reality of the current marketplace. Most companies need interoperable software for many functions, from exchanging Microsoft Office documents to sharing databases across systems. The ISO needs the support of IT leaders in order to support the development of software interoperability amid pressure applied by proprietary vendors.

“Software patents are a problem especially for open standards, because they may prevent a standard from being usable by everyone,” Perens told me. ” If there’s a royalty or discriminatory licensing to the patent, that usually rules out open source implementations.”

With ISO/IEC 26300, Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0., the ISO did address business software interoperability in 2006. This requires all office documents to be able to be sent from one software system to a competing software system without having to be re-formatted.
In the U.S., it has been hard to stop software vendors from filing or expanding software patents that lack integrity and bankrupting OSS startups with lawsuits. U.S. “lawmakers are so in thrall to big-media lobbyists that they do not even realize that counterarguments to copyright extensions exist,” said Professor at Stanford Law School and founder of the Center for Internet and Society Lawrence Lessig.

U.S. antitrust suits have gotten few results; but, in 2007, the European Commission filed the largest antitrust suit against Microsoft yet, for withholding information that would let rival vendors defend themselves from product integration, rolling out a penalty of $1.3 billion.

But, Perens pointed out, this was merely one step forward in a larger struggle.

Mar 6 2008   11:13PM GMT

Hamlet on Linux vs. Windows Server 2008

Posted by: Mark Gallagher
Red Hat, Microsoft, Linux versus Windows

Last week, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com editorial director Jan Stafford mentioned that the new Microsoft Windows Server 2008, which launched on February 27, has features designed to give it a Linux feel:

Any new Microsoft OS prompts Linux users to scratch their heads and ask, “Why pay lots to upgrade from one Windows release that doesn’t work very well to another that doesn’t work well either?” Users say that a Windows Server release launch is ultimately an opportunity for any Microsoft IT shop to evaluate Linux. Even a Linux-like Windows won’t provide the stability, flexibility and migration freedom of Linux.

We received several responses, including one from Steve Dasey in the UK who asks the immortal question, to be or not to be… proprietary:

Surely that is the question
Whether it is nobler to pay for support on an open source OS or for a proprietary OS.

Are either then free ?
How viable is it to run mission critical applications on a non commercially supported OS.
Are there price differences? - of course.
Are there advantages to both? - of course.
But the TCO is about a lot more than the cost of purchasing the boxed product.

I am pro choice, pro Linux, pro open source, but commercially apples need to be likened to apples

Alas, poor Tux. I knew him, Bill Gates. I think if Hamlet were running Windows Server 2008, he might remark “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I…to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous pricing.” Server 2008 Enterprise will run $3,999 versus $0 for RHEL. The enterprise support package that Red Hat offers is still significantly less, too, at $2,500.

Got a rebuttal? Philosophize in the comment section.