Red Hat deal: when will we know more?

Sam Varghese
Monday, 23 February 2009 19:23

Opinion and Analysis

Zymaris, who is well versed with Red Hat's products, said the good news for the Linux community was that by eschewing patent cross-licensing, the deal did not offer the appearance of tacit Red Hat acceptance of Microsoft's anti-Linux patent claims.

"In fact, it does the opposite. If Red Hat can do a deal with Microsoft without Microsoft shoe-horning patents into the mix, that's a statement to industry that Microsoft accepts Red Hat as a legitimate industry entity, and not a patent transgressor."

He said the take-home message was that by virtue of the fact that Microsoft signed off on this deal, even without the inclusion of its hoped-for patent fox-trap in-situ, it meant that it wanted the deal badly enough to subvert its own Linux marginalisation strategy.

"This, in turn, means that Linux in the virtualisation space has become an important enough piece of the corporate IT road-map, that not even Microsoft can avoid having to deal with it, on terms not of its own volition."

Tech consultant Russell Coker said while it woud take time for benefits from the collaboration to show through, the deal was a good thing.

"I have some clients who run CentOS and RHEL servers (that I installed and manage) as well as some Windows servers. Some of these clients have made decisions about the Windows servers that concern me (such as not using ECC RAM, RAID, or backups)," he wrote in his blog.

"It seems to me that if I was to use slightly more powerful hardware for the Linux servers I could run Windows virtual machines for those clients, manage all the backups at the block device level (without bothering the Windows sysadmins). This also has the potential to save the client some costs in terms of purchasing hardware and managing it.

"When this deal with MS produces some results (maybe in 6 months time) I will recommend that some of my clients convert CentOS machines to RHEL to take advantage of it."

No doubt Red Hat has chosen to sign the deal with a view to marginalising the most dominant player in the virtualisation space, VMWare. To that extent, it has colluded with Microsoft which has been looking to stymie the progress of the virtualisation market leader.

Reports abound that Citrix is also about to join hands with Microsoft in putting the squeeze on VMWare.

However, all these entities are one thing, Red Hat is entirely a different kettle of fish, it is an organic open source company and it has long traded on that. People want to know the detail of the deal. Else speculation will start to take precedence over fact and it does not take much intelligence to understand what that could do to Red Hat's image.