14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer (right) has contradicted Novell's CEO and president Ron Hovsepian(left), in relation to one aspect of the interoperability agreement inked by the two companies in November 2006. While Hovsepian claims that the interoperability partnership with Microsoft represents in no way a cross-license agreement, Ballmer, basing his affirmations on the same agreement, revealed that the Open Source world has respect for Intellectual property.
"The deal that we announced at the end of last year with Novell I consider to be very important. It demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property even in the Open Source world. I would not anticipate that we make a huge additional revenue stream from our Novell deal, but I do think it clearly establishes that Open Source is not free and Open Source will have to respect intellectual property rights of others just as any other competitor will," Ballmer commented during the Financial Analyst Briefing - New York City, Thursday, February 15, 2007.
The Microsoft and Novel interoperability agreement has been recently advanced when the two companies presented a joint road-map that will focus on four areas of development: directory and identity interoperability, and document format compatibility.
In New York, Ballmer was talking about the style of competition that Open Source brings to the table. "We have done very well versus Linux on the desktop and on the server, and I am actually hopeful that we will build share, particularly in Web Servers and high performance clusters, from Linux in the next year," Ballmer revealed, emphasizing the risk of pricing that is inherent with the competition with Open Source.