Microsoft interoperability team: Bring on Red Hat
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(InfoWorld) - Leaders of Microsoft's strategy to make its products more interoperable with competitive technologies said the company still hopes to strike a Linux pact with Red Hat similar to the partnerships it's forged with Linux vendors Novell, Xandros, and Linspire. "We'd love to do the same deal with Red Hat," said Tom Robertson, general manager of corporate interoperability and standards at Microsoft in an interview Friday. "We're always open to talking with them." That sentiment so far has not been the same on Red Hat's end, as the company has said it's not interested in a deal. Red Hat spokeswoman Leigh Day said Friday that is still the case. "We continue to believe that open source and the innovation it represents should not be subject to an unsubstantiated tax that lacks transparency," she said in an e-mail. Still, some wonder -- as Microsoft lines up the other Linux ducks in a neat little row -- if Red Hat might be next, and rumors suggest a pact might be imminent. Microsoft's latest Linux deal came Thursday in an intellectual property-sharing and interoperabilityÂ agreement with LinspireÂ that would shield the company's customers from Microsoft patent-infringement claims. The deal follows oneÂ struck by Microsoft and Linux distributor XandrosÂ last week, as well asÂ a high-profile and financially significantÂ deal with NovellÂ late last year. Microsoft has said it is seeking these partnerships for a couple of reasons. The one Robertson is most interested in is interoperability, as he -- along with Jean Paoli, general manager, interoperability and XML architecture -- is in charge of Microsoft's 18-month company-wide strategy in this area. Robertson said Microsoft customers have demanded the company address interoperability issues with other companies' software, including open source, and that IP (intellectual property) in those products is a concern for them. "If you look across the industry, you see companies working together to address IP on behalf of their customer base," he said. Microsoft has publicly said that Linux and other open source softwareÂ violates 235 of the company's patents. But rather than seek litigation as a way to settle these IP claims, Microsoft is striking these individual deals, Robertson said. However, much has been made of the fact that the company has not publicly disclosed any of the patents it claims open source software is violating. Robertson would not address why Microsoft will not show its patents and stopped short of claiming the deals with Novell, Linspire, and Xandros prove those companies are indeed violating Microsoft IP. None of the Linux companies will say so, either, and Novell in fact has vehemently denied infringement. This discrepancy is one reason some feel Red Hat will never sign up for an indemnification deal with Microsoft. The size and business viability of the companies that have signed on is another. Novell was flagging when its deal was struck -- and the company has continued to wane even since -- and some familiar with how it happened said it was a bailout to save the vendor from being split up and sold piecemeal. Indeed, Novell's U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing about the deal revealed that Novell got $348 million up front from Microsoft for patent cooperation and Linux coupons, while having to shell out only $40 million to Microsoft in return. Though Microsoft will not comment on the financial terms of deals with Xandros and Linspire, those familiar with the agreements said those companies also received financial compensation from Microsoft. This begs the question that if interoperability and protecting customers are Microsoft's ultimate goals for the deals, as Robertson said, why is the company so interested in Linux companies that ultimately don't affect that many customers? Many -- particularly those in the Linux camp -- suspect Microsoft is trying to make it appear that open source distributors are violating Microsoft IP to vilify them in an effort to dissuade customers from using Linux and other open source technologies. Bruce Perens, a longtime Linux and open source advocate, said Microsoft is giving Linux companies that are on the edge of going out of business money to create the illusion that Linux vendors are stealing its IP. Perens is a vice president at SourceLabs, a company that provides testing, management, and certification of open source software to users. "Here is Microsoft out collecting the losers in the Linux business and paying them money so they can ... paint open source as music pirates out there using Microsoft technology without a license," he said. "I think they're out to scare people." Even if this is the case, it take two to tango, and it's important to note that companies such as Novell, Linspire, and Xandros benefit in various ways from their deals with Microsoft. Aside from any financial compensation, the companies also gain access to Microsoft technology that would make their own Linux products more viable in the marketplace, analysts said. "These companies want the deals with Microsoft because it will make the products more attractive and more compatible with the Windows world," said Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner. "It's pretty clear that there is definitely value for these companies."
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Interoperability is the great challenge facing the open-source movement.
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This organization uses standard hardware and software builds throughout the enterprise, so everything that works during testing should work fine for users -- shouldn't it?
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Red Hat Inc.'s Enterprise Linux 4 products, scheduled for release early next year, will support five Indian languages, reflecting the growing importance of the Indian market, according to an executive of the Raleigh, North Carolina-based Linux company.
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Ubuntu and Red Hat are the most used Linux distributions among the 35,000 members of content-management vendor Alfresco&#39;s community, the company found in its second survey of trends in enterprise open-source software usage.The surveys help inform Alfresco&#39;s technology strategy, according to Ian Howells, Alfresco&#39;s chief marketing officer. &quot;It&#39;s important for us to know which platforms to test against first,&quot; he said, adding, &quot;It&#39;s in users&#39; interest to give us good data.&quot;Among Linux operating systems, usage of Ubuntu and Red Hat stood at 35 percent and 23 percent, respectively, according to the survey. Suse, OpenSuse, and Suse Enterprise collectively garnered 13 percent; Debian, 15 percent; and &quot;other&quot; distributions usage of 14 percent.Users also reported using a variety of proprietary enterprise software.Among Windows users, Vista adoption was just 2 percent, compared to 63 percent for Windows XP and 28 percent for Windows Server 2003.Microsoft&#39;s Office suite remained strong, however, with 66 percent usage. Twenty-four percent of the respondents reported they used OpenOffice. However, German and French users were twice as likely to use the latter compared to those in the U.S. or U.K., Alfresco said.Tomcat held a dominant position in the application server category, logging 72 percent. JBoss&#39; entry stood at 18 percent. Entries from Sun, BEA, and IBM rounded out the field.In the virtualization category, VMware perhaps predictably ranked highest, at 61 percent. Microsoft&#39;s Virtual Server took 16 percent, followed by Xen, Parallels, Virtual Iron and &quot;other&quot; offerings, according to the study.MySQL took home the database prize, with a 60 percent tally, followed by Oracle with 14 percent and Microsoft SQL Server with 13 percent.&quot;It kind of validates that people want to have a mixed stack,&quot; Howells said of the overall results.Alfresco collected data between July and December of last year, with survey participants coming from 260 countries, according to the company. Fifty percent were from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, while 24 percent were in the U.S., and 26 percent from other nations, Alfresco said.
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(InfoWorld) - Red HatÂ has scheduled a March release for RHEL5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5), the latest version of its open-source operating system, while it tries to fend off new competitive threats from OracleÂ and the Microsoft-NovellÂ partnership. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens discussed the RHEL5, the competition, the Fedora Project, and other issues with IDG News Service. Following is an edited transcript of the interview, conducted this week at the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum in San Francisco: IDGNS:Â RHEL5 comes out in March. What are some of the features that will move virtualization forward and keep Red Hat competitive? Stevens: RHEL5 is a scalable, full native 64-bit platform. In the second quarter of 2005, there was a crossover point where more 64-bit x86 systems were sold than 32-bit systems. So there is this untapped (64-bit) capability within the IT shops as many systems are still running 32-bit applications on 64-bit systems. With RHEL5, we aim to help allow IT and independent software vendorsÂ to realize the power of 64-bit computing on these multicore architectures. There is a lot of untapped capability in performance there, so we aim to help that. As to virtualization, it comes as an integrated feature set for RHEL5. IDGNS: How has the move by Oracle to undercut you on the price for its Linux support and the partnership between MicrosoftÂ and NovellÂ affected the direction you are taking Red Hat as CTO? Stevens: It hasn't really affected the day-to-day activities because Red Hat is focused on creating value for customers. We have developed really close relationships to understand where we need to drive technology to make a meaningful impact on their businesses. We focus on the fundamentals, not on something else. If you start to think about what is going to create revenue for the company versus what's going to create value for the customer, you're thinking about it the wrong way. Our results for the last quarter show that we are largely unaffected. We look at the vibrancy of the Fedora Project, our open-source community. Fedora is Red Hat's vehicle for bringing advanced technology really quickly to end-users. The last release of Fedora has been out for about four months, and we are averaging more than 100,000 downloads a week and 1.5 million downloads total. Compare that 100,000 a week to Oracle with their release of Oracle Linux. We reach in seven hours what they reached in their very first month of releasing that source code. With the Novell-Microsoft deal, we continue to believe interoperability is important. We didn't see anything new and meaningful in that interoperability agreement. With RHEL5, we're going to show rich compatibility between Windows and Linux. We already have that. We are absolutely open to and willing to work with Microsoft under an interoperability agreement but one that does not require our customers to pay anÂ intellectual property tax on Linux. IDGNS: What are your projects for the coming year besides RHEL5? Stevens: We'll continue an initiative we started last year around AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol). It's going to transform how you manage messaging systems in grid environments. We'll be bringing that to a bunch of (test) customers this year. AMQP is about allowing you to have data sources and data feeds that can scale across grid environments. IDGNS: What else? Stevens: We're leading the work in Linux around predictability with a project called Real Time. It's not just about dropping latency, even though it does that. It's around how we get determinism. It's really critical that the workloads you're running, whether its multimedia playback or transactions, know that there is a sort of boundary on the completion of transactions. Real Time is basically a rearchitecture of how the Linux kernel does locking and scheduling. We've had a team working on this for the past year and a half and we will be working with customers under a proof of concept through the course of this year.
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Conspiracy theories ahoy! Turbolinux and Microsoft are extending their collaboration agreement to improve interoperability and co-operate on research and development.â¦
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An investor's guide to service-oriented architecture
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(Sterling Commerce)  In September 2007, Computerworld invited IT and business leaders to participate in a survey on integrationand interoperability at their organizations. The survey was fielded through an invitation onComputerworld.com. The goal of the survey was to gain a better understanding of the issues surroundingintegration and interoperability. While commissioned by Sterling Commerce, all data for this survey wasgathered and tabulated independently by Computerworld Research. The following report represents top-lineresults of that survey.
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Higgins-project developers are creating a tool equivalent to Windows CardSpace but need Microsoft's go-ahead for certain features.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft says it will focus on four key areas to improve interoperability between its own software and other vendors' products.
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Not my bag, baby The news that the operations chief from a major US airline, Jim Whitehurst from Delta, is taking over at Red Hat from Matthew Szulik is a further sign of the growing legitimization of open source and Linux in the eyes of corporate, mainstream America. It underscores how the âsuits to sandalsâ ratio in the open source and Linux movement sliding further towards the suits.â¦
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There is a fascinating article on Groklaw called Searching for Openness in Microsoft's OOXML and Finding Contradictions. One of the most relevant comments in the article is "So, they plan to be the only one in the Linux world that can actually interoperate with Microsoft. How do you think they will achieve that? By sharing? On the contrary, they already market themselves as uniquely interoperable, which means they get to interoperate and you don't, unless you are their paying customer."  There is also the Novell comment, "Only Novell has Microsoftâs endorsement as its partner to drive Linux-Windows interoperability."