I'm not holding my breath that MS, Novell, or any other major company is doing anything at any time for overall benevolence to the world. I have learned to be very wary of anything I see or hear. This whole story just makes me think that some very underhanded deals have been made between the 2 companies. MS is also probably stabbing Novell in the back, which is to be expected since they already did that by stealing NDS and making it AD, as well as other companies products as well (I digress). Probably the strategy is 1 convince them that interoperability is the 'wave of the future' 2 convince them that MS and Novell are the best 2 combinations around 3 make sure they 'enmesh' all of the products, directory services, filesystems, browsers, systems management apps, databases, etc. 4. NOW MS can write code that makes Linux look bad- like make the Active Directory not work on Linux without a license upgrade (try presenting that scenario to management). 5. Continue to lure the 'weak link' - that is, middle management - people who often know little about the technology that is running in the enterprise. People who often make decisions based on how well it makes them look. People who, themselves, do not often have to handle or interface with technology. ---continue to lure them into a sense of 'security'. Also a big emotional player is the fear of 'auditing' by MS themselves. Some people, including a COO I know, are really paranoid about this. The strategy is similar to pimps and prostitutes. No one voluntarily decides to throw their life away. Instead the pimps (MS) offer them free drugs, get them hooked, and that guarantees they will work for them ongoingly and indefinitely ( go to bat for them, renew licenses, buy huge enterprise licenses, etc). Boy there are some strange bedfellows these days... Marc <div>On 11/2/06, Michael Wiktowy <<a href="mailto:michael.wiktowy@gmail.com"> michael.wiktowy@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Just finished watching the Novell/MS press conference and it looks like MS is trying to spread the software patent bogeyman again (now that their ploy with SCO isn't quite panning out as they imagined) but it seems to me due to the complex entanglement of upstream contributers, they would have a hard time pursuing any IP rights against anyone in the Open Source community now ... including Red Hat. Here's to hoping that Novell is acting in the greater good on the Open Source community rather than self interests. /Mike -- fedora-list mailing list <a href="mailto:fedora-list@redhat.com">fedora-list@redhat.com</a> To unsubscribe: <a href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list">https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list </a> </blockquote></div>