Early take on MS/Novell is not all bright

First take from this side of the Atlantic on the Microsoft/Novell partnership hasn't been entirely positive.

OK, so it's early days. And on the bright side, Microsoft has (publicly at least) acknowledged that open source plays at least some sort of role in business IT.

But, despite some initial enthusing from our very own technical editor Rupert Goodwins , things aren't looking quite so rosy.

The big question is how Novell will stay within the requirements of the GPL given its restrictive commercial tie-up with Microsoft.

We're sure the devil is in the detail of the partnership contract - and we're pretty sure Novell has it sussed. But for now the company is keeping firmly schtum, and it refused to comment on that very point to us today.

The majorly unhappy party at the moment is Red Hat, which has of course had an exceedingly bumpy week.

Personally I can't think of a more challenging few days than having two of the world's biggest software companies tread on your feet in succession.

Red Hat is bullish, but it has a tight corner to defend against the Novell partnership, and against Oracle's encroachment.

As Red Hat says, the Novell deal does demonstrate the level of business interest in open source.

But there is a lot of mileage to run in the MS/Novell deal, me thinks, and there'll be a few twists to the tale yet.

It will be interesting to see who gets whipped by the open source tale [tail?] first.

I'll leave the last word to NoCalDrummer , a San-Francisco-based reader, who's had a close run with Microsoft before.