Microsoft Paid Novell $356 Million in '07

Anonymous writes "At the end of this piece at Channelweb.com, it's reported that Microsoft paid Novell $355.6 million last year as part of their 'interoperability' deal. It's no small wonder, then, that Novell executives are saying the deal has been a huge success so far."

Re:What do the SUSE people think of this?

[j_sp_r]

As long it's a great distro (OpenSuse) I don't see any problem using it. Novel made Yast open source btw, something SUSE never did.

GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

Novell can be trusted as long as they use the GPL, since it is mostly incorruptible by its nature. If you start seeing them stray from the GPL, then you can start worrying.

So much for progress...

[the saltydog]

I thought that, in the IT world, progress was supposed to lower costs - witness many technology items that have gotten cheaper over the years. However, when it comes to anti-Linux FUD, it seems the price keeps going *up*.

Why is that?

"Future Periods"?

[erroneus]

Major Customers

No single customer accounted for more than 10% of our revenue in fiscal 2007, 2006, or 2005. During fiscal 2007, we received $355.6 million from Microsoft related to the Microsoft agreements discussed above, which is being recognized over future periods.

They received it but aren't recognizing it until later?! What does that mean exactly? Will it be passed on as bonuses to top execs and board members? It sounds like some sort of trick in reporting requirements. "We received a bunch of money, but we don't want to show that we're giving it to the people who made the deal... until later when no one is looking."

Re:Don't trust them

[Anonymous Coward]

Novell at the moment may not be the most faithful to the GNU ideals at the moment, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that Novell "can no longer be trusted".

Well, while I could agree on the substance (after all they haven't done anything against Linux and the FOSS community yet), still their deal with MS stinks: usually when a big corporation like MS sees something interesting in a much smaller one, they buy it with all assets, embrace some products and/or kill the competing ones.
Not this time, though: MS made a deal whose details are still secret and let Novell keep its appearance of pro-Linux-OSS company.
Novell didn't need MS money, but they got it and as a result the company will grow to the point they will be forced to continue to get money from Microsoft. At this point they're pwned because, as a Microsoft property, every single move will be directed to please Microsoft. That's the reason we cannot trust Novell anymore.

Patents?

[Fri13]

Okay, so Microsoft tells that GNU/Linux (or is it just Linux?) has 253 (?) Microsoft patents and companies should pay for Microsoft for using that technology. BUT, Microsoft pays for Novell big amount of cash and it looks so silly, like Microsoft would be the one who is using 253 ideas of technology and is paying for those companies for using it ;-)

Re:NASDAQ:NOVL Total Revenue

[SpinyNorman]

That $932M is revenue (gross receipts). Their gross profit was $672M, and overall they reported a LOSS of $44M for the year.

Re:What do the SUSE people think of this?

[RotateLeftByte]

I expect some Marketing Drone in Microsoft is at this moment cooking up their next FUD Campaign around the theme that SUSE is 'sort of ok' if you really, really have to use something other than our fantastic Windows products.
As far as at least one Microsoft Account manager I know, if they absolutely have to lose a sale to Linux, then it had better be to Novell/SUSE than the devil incarnate called RedHat.

IMHO, SLES/SLED is just different enough from RHEL/Fedora that I get frustrated when I have to make changes to root level config scripts etc just for SUSE. sort of like having to code web pages specifically for IE.

And even though, I normally prefer a GNOME desktop but with more bits of it being written using MONO, I am getting more and more uneasy about using it for the long term. I do think there is a risk from Microsoft getting tough about licensing with MONO etc.

Re:Patents?

[Locutus]

but they made sure that Novell also paid them some for each Suse Linux coupon Microsoft sells. But you got the just of it, Microsoft pays Novell because Microsoft says Linux has Microsofts IP. It's because it is all a plan to scare away business from Linux and just a step in the process.

In the 90's, Microsoft paid a UNIX company to do a port of MS Internet Explorer to HP and/or Solaris and they paid them well. Nobody wanted IE on UNIX but the reason for this was that this one company was a licensee of Microsofts Win32 source and Microsoft just quadrupled that fee to crush the other licensees. It was all part of a plan to get UNIX software companies to port their applications to Microsofts API's(Win32). Microsoft led them all to believe by moving to Win32, they could run their apps on both UNIX and Windows and therefore increase their customer base while only having one source code base. But once enough UNIX apps were ported, Microsoft ended that capability by massively increasing the fees it charged for the Win32 source. They just made sure that one company would still afford to license it so that monopoly anti-trust cases could not be brought against it. It worked.

Novell is but a pawn in Microsofts plan to stop progress of Linux and OSS in the marketplace. Good eye.

LoB