Looking back on my long (if not illustrious) career in IT, I am amazed at the number of alliances, co-operation agreements, joint ventures, etc. etc. which have taken place between players in the industry. Like other celebrity weddings, the more unlikely the bedfellows, the bigger the news. And unfortunately also like real celebrity weddings, an awful lot of them end in tears.

Let’s try and think of two really unlikely bedfellows – how about one of the leading commercial Linux companies, Novell, and the arch-enemy – Microsoft? For those with short memories, these two companies spent many years at each other’s throats in the directory, word processing, and spreadsheet markets. As Microsoft had already secured control of the desktop through its MS-Windows product, the result was a foregone conclusion – Novell was wiped off the desktop.

Novell raised a series of lawsuits to protest against Microsoft’s misuse of its monopoly position, and eventually received a USD 536 million out of court settlement while Microsoft continued killing off what was left of their business. Retiring to lick its wounds, Novell began to build a new career as an open-source company, purchasing Ximian and SUSE LInux. However, it still couldn’t resist the occasional poke at the old enemy. However, all that has changed, with the announcement yesterday that the two companies are really the best of friends and lawyers have sealed the knot between them.

Novell have collected several open-source luminaries in their wake, who have stoutly defended the decision – see blogs by Michel Meeks and Miguel de Icaza. Other big names have weighed in on the other side – see Bruce Perens for example, who casts doubts on the legality of what has been declared (which may be true, but who is going to take Novell to court when Microsoft are bankrolling the legal defence team?).

Leaving the broader implications for open-source in general to one side, what makes this interesting for the OpenOffice.org community is that Novell has been an increasingly active contributor to OpenOffice.org – employing Michael and others, sponsoring the Conference etc. Their new squeeze Microsoft have a key product launch coming up with MS-Office 2007 – why would they want to get in bed with a contributor to their only serious competitor, OpenOffice.org 2?

From an OpenOffice.org perspective, I still see Novell as being one of the good guys – compared to say IBM who repeatedly make good speeches but never actually contribute. So, if Microsoft have thrown money at Novell and boosted their share price then I’m not complaining.

The fact is, in open-source people matter more than brands – I have enough confidence in the integrity of guys like Michael to believe that they will rapidly jump ship if Novell does start to damage the community.

So, I’m not as enthusiastic as the interview with Gregg Keizer makes me appear – OpenOffice Blesses Microsoft-Novell Pact is putting it a bit strongly – more OpenOffice.org hopes that Novell has signed a robust pre-nuptial agreement.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 4th, 2006 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Open-source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.