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First deliverables of Microsoft-Novell agreement

Several months after the famous Microsoft-Novell cooperation announcement, the first positive signs of the agreement are popping up:

• Novell has adapted its award-wining Zenworks desktop management suite to run natively on Active Directory. It is remarkable that Novell plays down its own metadirectory software such as Novell Identity Manager, but it is certainly a good thing small and medium-sized businesses.
• Novell has developed an open source version of Microsoft's InfoCard identity technology that will run on both Linux and Mac. Actually, Novell was already working on this long before the Microsoft deal, so the source code is available and was presented at Novell's Brainshare.
  A more technical description of the InfoCard selector for OS X and Linux based on the Brainshare presentation can be found at the excellent "Between the Lines" blog.

Of course, not everybody is happy with the Microsoft-Novell agreement. Open source guru Bruno Perens wrote an extensive blog entry "What They Aren't Telling You" about the deal. Also, Richard Stallman (who will present on the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement at our local University next week), lashed out at the deal in his presentation made at the fifth international GPLv3 conference in Tokyo.

Posted by admin at March 17, 2007 12:22 AM