February 17, 2009

Operating system suppliers Red Hat, which is the leading commercial Linux distro by some measures, and Microsoft, the only maker of Windows, today announced a cross-platform support agreement that will allow operating systems from one to run on the hyper visors of the other

The interoperability agreement has been forced on the two companies, which are not exactly natural allies or even particularly friendly even if they are mostly civil, by their respective customer bases, software partners, and resellers, explained Mike Evans, vice president of corporate development at Red Hat, and Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization strategy at Microsoft, in a web cast this morning.

The Red Hat-Microsoft deal is short and sweet, and bears little resemblance to the landmark interoperability, licensing, and patent protection deal that Red Hat rival Novell signed with Microsoft in November 2006.

That deal irked plenty in the open source community because of licensing issues relating to Linux and the applications that ride atop it. But it has boosted Novell's financials, with Microsoft buying hundreds of millions of dollars in licenses for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and distributing them to its Windows customer base.