Novell has revealed that Microsoft will pay the company $240 million upfront for subscription certificates for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Under the deal, Microsoft may sell, reuse or distribute the certificates under an alliance between the rival software companies.
Furthermore, Microsoft will offer an additional $60 million to market ways for Novell’s Linux open source products to work together with MS Windows products plus another $34 million on a sales force for marketing the offering over the next five years.
Microsoft will also pay Novell $108 million under a patent agreement and in turn, Novell will pay MS at least $40 million over five years that will be based on a percentage of revenue of two Novell products. This is primarily to make it possible for Windows to work with Linux and vice-versa.
A few months back, Microsoft faced a lawsuit over sublicensing third-party technology on Microsoft’s SQL server to rival companies of the patent-holding technology firm. Perhaps this time, they have made sure that the deal should include a clause that would make it possible to distribute Novell’s certificates to rival software companies.
However the most exciting thing about this deal is that Microsoft is actually encouraging inter-compatibility of its proprietary OS Windows and open source OS Linux. Let’s see how things will shape up in the coming few years.
News: BusinessWeek Online
Comments
The announcement demonstrates that more business and government agencies are looking to a combination of open and proprietary solutions and companies must work to offer interoperability solutions that enable customers to deploy open source and proprietary software more efficiently and addresses the IP open source issues that customers were most concerned about.