Is it a Good week for Open Source?

Microsoft and Novell surprised everyone this week by announcing a joint partnership on Linux!! No other than Palmer and Hovespian, the CEO’s of the respective companies, announced the news in San Francisco. The agreement states that Novell will pay to Microsoft fees for using its patents on interoperability between Office and Interoffice and virtualization management. Microsoft committed to buy 70000 Suse Enterprise server and to participate in a joint research Lab for inter-operability between Linux and Windows.

On one side this is a the first time Microsoft acknowledges Linux as a serious player, but on the other side Novell acknowledges that Linux is infringing on Microsoft patents in both OpenOffice and Samba software, but Microsoft pointed out that this partnership will solve the patents problem only for Suse and not for other version of Linux!! This will open the door to pursuing all other Linux vendors legally. That reminds me of someone who said “If Microsoft had a penis; I will try hard to keep it away from my sister”

In the same week Microsoft partnered with Zend to help improve performance for PHP on its 2003 and upcoming LongHorn servers (only the servers).

This week also Oracle announced that it will release its own version of Linux which will be a clone of RedHat but stripped from its branding and will offer support cheaper than RedHat. A move that will harm the open source vendor but not intentionally since the target of this move is Microsoft. Oracle always wanted to have its own platform and the tension between the 2 companies is no secret to anyone, but this vendor lock-in is no good for Linux and the open source community.

I think that whoever thought that Open source is a solution for vendor lock-in, please wake up. Corporate America is what rules the world, including software.