14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft and Novell announced a Windows-Linux interoperability agreement back in November 2006. The two companies recently built upon the initial agreement by announcing a joint road-map. The first installment of the Microsoft-Novell product-map delivers a time table for the four areas of focus: virtualization, Web services for managing physical and virtual servers, directory and identity interoperability, and document format compatibility.
And while the Microsoft and Novell interoperability agreement made its first steps forward providing tangibility to the original promises, Novell's Chief Executive Officer and president Ron Hovsepian, said that this aspect will not get in the way of the two companies competing directly on the desktop OS market.
Despite the alliance with Microsoft, Hovsepian has declared that Novell will continue to fight the adoption of Windows Vista. Furthermore, Hovsepian commented that he was delighted with the initial cold welcome that Windows Vista got concomitantly with the operating system's commercial availability.
Hovsepian stated that Novell tackles its interoperability partner aggressively. One aspect that Novell's CEO interpreted as an advantage was the fact that, unlike Windows Vista, a mammoth operating system that spent five years in Microsoft's laboratories, open source solutions are flexible and easily scalable and adaptable.
And yet again Hovsepian defended Novell's interoperability partnership with Microsoft claiming that it is in no way a cross-license agreement. Novell's CEO stated that the legal issues associated with the alliance are exclusively associated with the customers and not with the two companies.