| Microsoft and SUSE extend patent and interoperability pact |
Jul. 25, 2011
 Microsoft and Attachmate business unit SUSE announced a four-year extension of their controversial strategic collaboration that involves Microsoft's purchase of $100 million in SUSE Linux certificates. Meanwhile, the Linux community puzzles over Microsoft's major contributing role to Linux 3.0, and its surprise birthday greeting to Linux.
The agreement extends the companies' efforts to jointly build, market, and support mixed source, inter-compatible Windows and Linux solutions, says Microsoft. Microsoft and SUSE (formerly Novell) also will continue their collaboration in cloud, virtualization, and manageability technologies, including a cross-platform solution with Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, "giving IT managers a robust solution to migrate to a private cloud architecture," says Microsoft.
The announcement does not state how much Attachmate's SUSE will be paying Microsoft to protect it from being sued over patents. However, Microsoft does note that it has bought $100 million in additional SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates.
No more explanation was provided, but as Mary Jo Foley describes it in her ZDNet blog on Microsoft, the $100 million in certificates "are designed to insure Microsoft customers who are implementing Linux that they won't be caught in any Microsoft-Linux patent crossfire."
In addition, with the renewed alliance, SUSE now enables customers to consolidate their Linux support by offering subscription support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and community Linux distributions such as CentOS, says Microsoft. It was not made clear how this support relates to Microsoft's involvement.
Same as it ever was -- since 2006, that is
The extension of services will only cement the suspicion among many Linux and open source advocates that like Novell, the newly Attachmate-owned business unit SUSE, is a Microsoft collaborator that has betrayed the Linux community to the "evil empire." Novell's November 2006 patent and collaboration agreement with Redmond was highly controversial in the Linux community, and presaged a series of patent agreements over the years in which Linux, and now Android, vendors agree to pay Microsoft for not suing it over patents it claims over Linux (see farther below for background).
On the other hand, the agreement will be hailed by many in the industry, especially companies that deploy both Windows and SUSE Linux software. Since the 2006 agreement, the joint Microsoft-SUSE collaboration has served more than 725 customers worldwide, says Microsoft in its announcement, which listed 10 new joint customers, all of them apparently headquartered in Europe. (Following the Attachmate acquisition, SUSE has moved its headquarters to Nuremberg, Germany.)
Despite the company name change and new owner, the original pact with Novell was not due to expire until 2012. As a result, the new deal now extends through Jan. 1, 2016.
Last week, SUSE announced a partnership with Xamarin, which formed to support the open source Microsoft .NET clone "Mono" after Attachmate jettisoned the Mono team in May. The agreement grants Xamarin a broad license to all IP covering Mono products, including Mono for Android, and calls for Xamarin to provide technical support to SUSE customers using Mono-based products, said SUSE.
The renewed agreement is not surprising considering Attachmate's long-time partnership with Redmond. As part of the Attachmate acquisition Novell agreed to sell some of its intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings LLC, a hithero unknown consortium of technology companies organized by Microsoft. The $450 million sale led to some 882 patents potentially available to Microsoft.
Most of the patents were speculated to be related to WordPerfect, which Novell acquired in the late 1990s. WordPerfect was also at the center of Novell's lawsuit against Microsoft in 2008 regarding anti-competitive behavior.
Microsoft's Sherman's March through Linux and Android vendors
Since launching its IP licensing program in December 2003, Microsoft has signed hundreds of patent licensing agreements with embedded Linux firms. The latter include Samsung, Fuji Xerox, Kyocera Mita, Melco Holdings Buffalo, Brother International, and most notoriously, convinced Amazon.com to pay it patent royalties over the use of Linux in its Kindle e-readers.
Over the last two months, Microsoft has announced Android patent-licensing agreements with four different Android vendors. Including its earlier deal with HTC, the company can now boast five Android patent deals. Unconfirmed reports say that Microsoft is working on a similar deal with Samsung, asking for as much as $15 per Android device from the consumer electronics giant. Meanwhile, Microsoft still has ongoing Android-related lawsuits against two companies who refused to sign an agreement: Motorola and Barnes & Noble.
Microsoft kernel contributions and a strange birthday video
Along with all these big legal sticks and occasional Linux trash-talking by Steve Ballmer and other Microsoft execs, Microsoft has tossed a few carrots at the open source heathens. In July 2009, the company made the surprising announcement that it was releasing 20,000 lines of code under GPLv2 for three Linux device drivers, for potential contribution to the Linux kernel. In September of that year, Microsoft further reached out to the open source community by announcing the formation of the CodePlex Foundation, chartered with enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities.
Earlier this month, the shocking news emerged that Microsoft was the seventh largest contributor to Linux 3.0 and the fifth largest corporate contributor. Yet, all 361 changes or patches that Microsoft made to the Linux kernel turned out to be related to its Hyper-V driver, just like the 2009 contributions. Microsoft apparently went to work only after Linux kernel watchdog Greg Kroah-Hartman threatened to toss out the earlier Hyper-V code from the kernel unless it was updated.
Last week, Microsoft posted a light-hearted video birthday greeting on YouTube, celebrating the upcoming 20th anniversary of Linux (see below). The cartoon shows cartoon versions of the Linux "Tux" mascot and Bill Gates bickering over the years. It includes a reference to the confidential, but leaked "Halloween documents" of 1998, in which Microsoft execs called open source software and Linux in particular, a "major threat" to Microsoft.
The video concludes by changing the text "Microsoft vs. Linux?" to "Microsoft and Linux?"
The response from the Linux blogger community, as compiled by Katherine Noyes on LinuxInsider today, is at times sarcastic, jaded, and defiant. As Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza told Noyes, the video is contradictory in that it refers to the Halloween Documents, yet the video also notes that in year's past, Microsoft saw Linux and open source ideas as "childish."
The latter statement "directly contradicts the stance of the Halloween Documents, which prove that Microsoft saw Linux as a threat," Espinoza was quoted as saying. The video portrays the Halloween Documents as Microsoft "trying to scare Linux" in response to Tux throwing a rock at a Microsoft logo.
As for our own expert analysis, we wonder -- why Bill Gates? Wasn't Ballmer available for a sketch portrait? We also wondered why Bill is about three times taller than Tux. In fact, to demonstrate the rise of Linux, the video shows the penguin resorting to a mechanical pedestal to make himself as tall as Bill.
At least one penguin species -- the Empire Penguin (pictured above, right) grows to over four feet. Is Microsoft saying Bill is now 12 feet tall?
Microsoft's 20th anniversary of Linux birthday greeting onYouTube
Source: Microsoft
(Click to play)
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