Two years ago, Microsoft and Novell announced their voucher-based partnership between 
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Windows. At the time, the announcement caused much anger among "opensourceilites," who had been understandably angry at Microsoft's anti-Linux, threats-to-sue marketing tactics. A lot has changed since then -- and we won't take you down memory lane about it. The important element of today's announcement is that the companies are also giving more details on two joint products that stemmed from the collaboration. They've announced a release date for the upcoming Advanced Management Pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, and they have released a beta version of Novell's Moonlight rich-media browser application.
Novell's Advanced Management Pack is slated to be available in the first half of 2009, timed with the release of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. The management pack gives OpsMgr 2007 R2 the ability to manage SUSE servers. Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight for Linux -- a competitor to Flash. Silverlight is currently available for multiple browsers on Windows and Mac machines. Moonlight is a plug-in for Firefox running on Linux.
The partnership between one-time arch rivals Microsoft and Novell has been a success story of how Linux and Windows can work together in the data center to the benefit of the enterprise and the vendors. The two companies said that during the second year of this relationship, they have added more than 200 new joint customers, including Alticor, BP Oil International and China Mobile. The original agreement was for a five-year period in which Microsoft committed to sell vouchers for SUSE to Windows customers. But as of the end of the second year, Microsoft has already sold more than 70% of the original number of vouchers, the companies say.
More than that, the idea that Windows and Linux must remain at odds has been put to rest. While Microsoft still has a lot of work to do to heal the rift it unnecessarily created between itself and open source developers, by the accounts of people involved, the company has been heading in that direction.
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Added support part of the deal, too
Microsoft coupons cover Novell's new SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Subscription with Expanded Support, says this story from Network World: "Novell unveiled the expanded support option last week as a way to entice users to migrate from Red Hat and the CentOS to SUSE Linux. In addition to support for SUSE, the certificates provide Red Hat and CentOS server users with binaries built from source code publicly released by Red Hat for its platform."