The-Source.com

Recently, Novell and Microsoft had a webcast with The Register – guess who was watching?

In Which Your Noble Hero Braves Market-Speak to Deliver a Story

The webcast “Making IT Work in the Real World” runs about an hour, and a pretty bland hour at that.
I confess I skipped through quite a bit of the droning – I’m not really as brave as the little headlines make out sometimes.

There are a few slides that were of interest, because I think they show a darker side of the Novell-Microsoft collaboration. Keep in mind this was a pure PR fluff piece, so Novell and Microsoft had plenty of time to prepare and the hosts were not there to play any sort of investigative role. It was pretty much open mic night for your favorite corporate spokesmen.

Let’s see what they had to say!

In Which a Bit of That Good Old-Fashioned FUD is Spread around

Here’s a slide where the gentleman from Novell talked up the 3 pillars of value that the Novell-Microsoft collaboration delivers:

"Intellectual Property"

There’s that good old “peace of mind” codeword that Microsoft and Novell love so much to throw around. How does one reconcile Novell’s statement that the “agreement with Microsoft is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property” with the constant marketing that only Novell can offer “IP peace of mind” and the bullet point that “Microsoft and Novell” provide “patent coverage”?

A little fancy dancing, perhaps?

See this fellow here? He’s my bestest friend

Here’s a slide where Novell plays up the exclusivity of their collaboration with Microsoft:

"Only" Novell can offer you this?

In the blue box we are told that “SLES” is the only Linux distribution officially supported by MSFT on Hyper-V.
This is strange, because both Microsoft and Red Hat, when talking about Red Hat on Hyper-V say:

Q5: How do customers get support for the validated solutions? Who do they call?

A5: Customers with valid support agreements with both companies call either Microsoft or Red Hat to have their issues resolved. If the first vendor contacted cannot resolve the issue they will work with the other vendor to come to a resolution for the mutual customer.

I mean it sure looks to me like that is Microsoft officially supporting Red Hat.
I know I’m not a captain of the industry, but I am lettered and can even sign my name if someone tells me where to make the mark.

I like the wording of the green box, because I suspect it might be technically true at this exact moment in time, but we do know (again from Microsoft) that the folks at Red Hat tell me that they’ll “provide WHQL [Windows Hardware Quality Labs] drivers for a variety of Windows Server versions.” So not only will you get cooperative technical support, you’ll also get high-performing enlightened VMs.

And, come to think of it, wasn’t the whole purpose of the drivers Microsoft just released to provide enlightened support at the kernel level?

So yeah basically this entire slide is, to put it politely, inaccurate.
At best it is half inaccurate-now and half soon-to-be-inaccurate.

Hit ‘em with the stinger!

Finally, one last slide that I thought was funny:

You're calling *this* a feature?

OK, so we already have shown that SUSE Linux is not the only Linux distribution supported by Microsoft. I don’t want to touch endorsed, too vague and I’m not sure that’s really something to lay claim to, anyway!

I also found it funny that Novell asserts Linux is “FOS”. What’s that all about? Is it to distance Novell from “FLOSS”, or is “FOS” some common acronym that I just haven’t ran across? I was pretty sure I’ve read the whole internets, but I guess I could have missed a page or two.

This was originally posted at mono-nono.com