The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
Once each company completes testing, customers with valid support agreements will receive cooperative technical support for running Windows Server operating system virtualised on Red Hat Enterprise virtualisation, and running Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualised on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.
Future versions of products from both companies are also planned to be validated under these agreements.
The agreements contain no patent or open source licensing components or financial clauses, other than industry-standard certification/validation testing fees.
When Novell signed its deal with Microsoft back in November 2006, Mark Webbink, then one of Red Hat's top legal people, said very confidently: "...let's see where we all are a year from now. We will still be standing. We still believe that we will be the dominant player in the Linux market because, by that time, there won't be any other Linux players. We will have succeeded once again."
He was partly right - Novell is still standing but only just.
In October 2007, Novell was boasting that it was the only one selling the Linux that "works with Windows." Well, the times have certainly changed, haven't they?
For a long time, Novell was the only date in town as far as Microsoft was concerned. Now, given that cooperation with Red Hat will definitely bring in more money, a lot of Microsoft's attention is going to be focused in that direction.
But unlike a jilted lover, Novell cannot start wooing anybody else. There is no other game in town.
Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza can run around in circles, chasing APIs from Redmond in a desperate attempt to reproduce Microsoft's technology as open source. I think it's time for de Icaza to take the money and run.
Novell is going to come unstuck sometime in the not-too-distant future. No amount of grovelling is going to save the company.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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