Triplesourced
Reporting, musing and not to mention some random scribbling on tech issues from green/sustainable IT to security. (http://adonoghue.wordpress.com/)
Monday 16 February 2009, 5:14 PM
Is Red Hat threatening to do a Novell with latest virtualisation move?
It smacks slightly of the kind of release you'd expect from the Novell/MS tie-up but it's unlikely that Red Hat would go that far - not without losing a chunk of its management, customers and support base.
More likely this is more a case of my enemy's enemy is my friend with both software makers looking to unseat VMWare from its perch atop the virtualisation tree.
Here's an excerpt from the Red Hat release:
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that, in response to strong customer demand, it has signed reciprocal agreements with Microsoft Corporation to enable increased interoperability for the companies’ virtualisation platforms. Each company will join the other's virtualisation validation/certification program and will provide coordinated technical support for their mutual server virtualisation customers. The reciprocal validations will allow customers to deploy heterogeneous, virtualised Red Hat and Microsoft solutions with confidence.
“The world of IT today is a mixture of virtualised and non-virtualised environments. Red Hat is looking to help our customers extend more rapidly into virtualised environments, including mixed Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows Server environments,” said Mike Evans, vice president, Corporate Development at Red Hat. “Red Hat listened when our customers asked us to provide interoperability between our respective guest and host virtualisation solutions. We are excited to announce these agreements today as the result of our collaboration with Microsoft.”
You can find more on Red Hat's blog here:
http://www.press.redhat.com/
It seems Red Hat's Scott Crenshaw is quite aware of what some people could read into this announcement:
One of the big questions on the minds of many members of the open source community is whether Red Hat has compromised its ideals. Nothing could be further from the truth. Red Hat’s growth, and its differentiation, come from its belief in and commitment to, the open source community model. It is our view – and this view is institutionalized throughout our company – that we have to serve the community, as well as our customers, shareholders, and employees. The moment we stop doing so, we eliminate the differentiation which drives our growth.
So we undertook this interoperability effort with strict adherence to our principles. The companies signed two agreements: One in which Red Hat joined the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP), which validates Windows Server guests running on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization technologies, and the other which certifies Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests running on Windows Server Hyper-V.
The agreements contain no patent or open source license components. There are no financial clauses beyond simple certification testing fees. These are straightforward certification and validation agreements.
I am excited about this step forward for the industry. And I am pleased we did it without compromising our commitment to open source. That’s leadership we can be proud of.
PreviousComments on this post
This is a VERY different deal to what Novel did, and is a total kick in the teeth for them. RedHat have actually given away nothing, and made no compromises. No patent deal, no NDAs.
This could get very interesting. To many FLOSS people they won't just be on the moral high ground, they will appear to be on a mountaintop!
Agree with Tezzer.
This inter-operation agreement doesn't do a behind-the-scenes patent cross-licencing deal. This is very different to the Microsoft-Novell play.
It seems that Microsoft has had to do this deal because it believed that it would otherwise be in a less competitive position within the virtualisation marketplace; this goes to show you the clout that the Linux industry (inclusive of Red Hat) has nowadays.
Interesting.
My headline was a bit of a tease and having met several of the managers at Red Hat - I am pretty certain that they would never agree to the same terms that Novell accepted from MS.
But the language of this release doesn't quite come across as Microsoft agreeing to play ball with Red Hat - it is still written as if Red Hat is cooperating with Microsoft.
Someone in Red Hat approved this line for example:
“We welcome Red Hat’s participation in our Server Virtualisation Validation Program and look forward to ongoing collaboration with them to bring the benefits of coordinated technical support to our customers for their heterogeneous IT environments.”
I am sure that we will eventually see - and in some areas it is already probably happening - proprietary software makers like Microsoft making announcements where the deferentially join the open source de facto standard but not sure we are there yet.
But who knows how another two years of downturn will change things - "good enough" is the new good, it seems.
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