Michael Dolan Dot Com

Friday, November 3rd, 2006

Microsoft – Novell: The Beginning

I unfortunately feel uncomfortable giving my own views in detail due to where/what I work on and my level of insight relative to the public at large. With that background, here are my few comments that I admit have little detail, but try to frame a view. The reality is it’s all grey area; nothing’s black and white; and in the end the extreme views/conclusions never happen (unless you’re in law school and get ‘that one example case of the extreme‘ that after further thought wasn’t so extreme really).

Cons:

First, this will take a long time to fully understand. I think most in the community have a (founded) distrust of Microsoft. If you follow closely the proceedings with ODF (very closely), you can see the foundation for that distrust in action live today. If you recall the Sun-Microsoft partnership – besides for some good press articles recounting McNealy’s jabs – there was never any real, tangible output. Have you noticed anything that’s better b/c of it? Will we ever notice something to come of this announcement? I’m highly skeptical.

Three things are certain: Microsoft does not generate revenue on Linux, Linux/ODF are clearly counter to Microsoft’s core Windows/Office strategy, and Microsoft has been for years planning/executing a strategy to counter Linux and open source. Microsoft considers open source in its non-commercial form a strategic threat rather than ‘embrace and profit’ from it as say Red Hat. This announcement seemed an attempt by Ballmer to make it Linux commercial – but it’s not; it’s hybrid. Now, if people think this announcement is Microsoft turning over a new leaf … it’s not April 1 and therefore not your day to shine.

Novell: TBD. There are so many details to understand.

Pros:

Linux Market: If Microsoft supporting/endorsing Linux doesn’t get people excited about where this market is heading, I don’t know what would. In that view, ignore the terms/details of this announcement, step back, and enjoy the glow of knowing a community cause a giant to change its course. I have a strong gut feel this will have a huge growth impact on the linux server AND DESKTOP market as we go forward. (I didn’t say this particular announcement is positive or negative but rather said I think it will cause ‘growth’).

As people weed through the details, bloggers dream up conspiracies, companies do their diligence, we’ll all know more. Throughout all the churn though, developers will develop, and code will be created and the community will innovate. It was a relief to watch the SystemTap dev mailing list yesterday. All this flurry of activity was going on around them, yet they were discussing architecture, patches, fixes, and how to make the code better. I IM’d a friend at the world’s largest search engine working on next gen storage architectures (and Linux/Python, etc) and he IM’d back “what announcement?”

I feel confident the open source development community will go on unphased. Open source started and has always been something different – and it will continue that way. So while the analysts, press, and IT voices all ponder, analyze, speculate, comment, and ‘throw up’, I’m optimistic, the developers will keep adding new features for me to use in Compiz, XGL, and Gnome.

Outlook:

I’m optimistic for the growth of Linux b/c of this move. There are certainly many angles and lenses to view this situation through. I’m sure we’ll end up with views from many extremes; hopefully a cautious, conservative, and experienced voice of the community wins out.

I started off planning a small, short entry that would say nothing… guess I failed.

Burning Question / Jab:

One last question though… does this mean we won’t see ‘Get the Facts’ ads anymore? The advertising industry may lose millions… maybe someone should analyze that impact.