Microsoft to buy up to $100M in SUSE Linux support vouchers

[ivancat]

Originally Posted by ComputerWorld

Microsoft Corp., which two years ago agreed to buy and resell $240 million worth of enterprise support subscriptions for Novell Inc.'s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system, will buy and resell up to another $100 million of vouchers, the two companies said today.

The unusual scenario in which the world's dominant proprietary software vendor is helping to market open-source software such as Linux began in November 2006, when the two former foes agreed to a set of pioneering cross-licensing and interoperability deals, with Microsoft admitting that many of its business customers were also fans of open-source software. Microsoft sold $156 million worth of support vouchers within 18 months to customers such as Wal-Mart, HSBC Holdings, Renault, Southwest Airlines, BMW and others, according to Susan Hauser, general manager of strategic partnerships and licensing at Microsoft.

the full story is here: http://www.computerworld.com/action/...intsrc=hm_list

just came across. they've sold their souls

[mnisay]

could be fishy on the paranoid side but reminds me of bug's bunny cartoons saying

if you can't beat 'em, join them

[SGSeries2]

So, wait, Walmart and the like use SUSE? Never knew, but not all that surprising.

[glennzo]

Microsoft should be banned from buying or controlling anything remotely Linux related.

[BLooDMaN]

glennzo, agree!

But I think this deal isn't so bad for *nix users.

[RupertPupkin]

Originally Posted by mnisay

if you can't beat 'em, join them

I prefer George Carlin's version of that, which is "If you can't beat 'em, arrange to have 'em beaten."

[kona0197]

Hey! Nothing wrong with Walmart.

[ivancat]

Originally Posted by glennzo

Microsoft should be banned from buying or controlling anything remotely Linux related.

After the latest openSUSE (11th) I'd say "buy it". It's already slow as hell and needs tweaking right from the start to make it normal rpm distro

[b_martinez]

Originally Posted by mnisay

if you can't beat 'em, join them

Closer to the point
"If you can't beat them, hire someone who can."

I had the opposite experience with OpenSuse 11. It worked first time for me (Gnome) I didn't have to downgrade the X server to the previous release (F8) and use the radeon driver from 2 releases prior (F7) for it to work, as I do with Fedora 9.

There are more packages available for OpenSuse 11 than there are for Fedora. They include Gjiten (A Japanese/ English dictionary that I use every day) The last RPM of that for Fedora was for FC4 and is an older version. They also have various DVD ripper packages for Gnome that aren't in any of the Fedora repos (third party ones either)

The only thing that stopped me using it as my main distro was this darn licensing deal with MS! Today I got bored and replaced the OpenSuse install with Mandriva 2008.1. It also suffers from a lack of packages

Not much else I can try as OS 11 and Mandriva are the only two distros that work on my hardware without futzing around

Wayne

[Seve]

Originally Posted by b_martinez

Closer to the point
"If you can't beat them, hire someone who can."

Hello Bill:
Slightly askew of the topic .... please forgive me all

It looks like they are trying that as well ...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1219..._us_whats_news

Seve

[Evil_Bert]

Originally Posted by Seve

Hello Bill:
Slightly askew of the topic .... please forgive me all

It looks like they are trying that as well ...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1219..._us_whats_news

Seve

Well that's highly appropriate. After all, he was famous for a show about nothing ....

[Silpheed2K]

So let me guess... Microsoft buys these vouchers... helps make GNU/Linux a little popular... then when it bugs out and falls short.. bashes the crap out of it and shows how Windows is more appealing?
Also, helping divide the distros. (when it would just put them in direct competition which could be healthy because MS may not fully understand how open source works.. then again they are a software company.)

[ivancat]

Originally Posted by Silpheed2K

So let me guess... Microsoft buys these vouchers... helps make GNU/Linux a little popular... then when it bugs out and falls short.. bashes the crap out of it and shows how Windows is more appealing?
Also, helping divide the distros. (when it would just put them in direct competition which could be healthy because MS may not fully understand how open source works.. then again they are a software company.)

Hmm, I'd the explanation here is a bit more trivial: MS makes money. Makes money on open source. Nevertheless Novell (SUSE's sponsor) benefits of it. Why? Simple, eh: MS helps to spread their product, thus they get more clients = they get more income from support subscriptions.

@ Wayne: I think it [performance] mostly depends on hardware, though I installed 11 on several machines and on each installer was slow. Software... maybe, it has more. But I got a bit disappointed when was unable to find eclipse on the install dvd, for example. Also, they had PackageKit (it's lake plague! it takes over the world...), beagle, some other stuff I dislike (not really a problem to get rid of, but after all it's not worth time spent on it, at least it seemed like that to me). Also, it didn't support my usb modem (as I suspect because USB generic networking framework (or smth like that) wasn't enabled in the kernel, or maybe YaST is simply dumb). That's why I wiped it out from my testing partition after a couple of days. Mandriva, I liked it more. It had better control center, supported my modem, all good, tuned everything really quick. But, eh, it's a bit too glamorous, not my style really, so gave it up as well.

[LDC]

Suse was already bound to Novell, which is bound to Microsoft, so nothing new under the Sun.
They are just trying to "genetically" alter linux turning it into Winux, and then making the differences disappear at all.
I doubt it will ever happen for real, I mean, there will always be some "pure" linux knights that will totally refuse any compromise with Evil, thus creating (or simply mantaining) an "evil-free" linux.... but in the worst scenario, where Evil prevails bloating all *nix and BSODding them all, well.... I will search a new OS