Footloose and "patent free" is Red Hat/Microsoft's virtualization agreement

Red Hat and Microsoft will validate each other's virtualization technologies per an agreement announced yesterday. Each company will join the other's virtualization validation/certification program and will provide technical support for their mutual server virtualization customers. Hard to say what is the more interesting, more appealing aspect of the deal. Could it be that Microsoft has gotten over itself with its Linux-violates-Microsoft-patents claims and moved on the practical matter of establishing broader partnerships? Could it be that customers come out the winners? Maybe both of the above.

Here is a list of the key parts of the deal, according a press release from Red Hat.

1) Red Hat will validate Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows 2000 Server SP4, and Windows Server 2008 guests on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization technologies.

2) Microsoft will validate Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and 5.3 guests on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (all editions) and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008.

3) After validation of these servers is complete, customers with the appropriate support contracts can get coordinated technical support for running Windows Server VMs on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization or RHEL VMs on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

The press release spells out that the agreement does not cover anything related to patents or licensing. It also notes that no "selling out" occurred -- at least if selling out requires money to exchange hands. Neither company is paying the other anything except the standard fees they both have in place to certify products as being compliant with their respective virtualization technologies.

This is obviously nowhere near the kind of deal that Microsoft has with Novell --where Microsoft is giving out vouchers for Novell's SUSE and has provided a kind of mafia-style "protection" of agreeing not to sue over mysterious patents. (It is our guess that the European Commission, with its zeal for slapping fines on Microsoft, would love to preside on a compliant over a Microsoft/Linux-related patent lawsuit.)

It is well known that Microsoft has been in negotiating talks forever with Red Hat. A few months ago, in an interview with Microsoft Subnet, Microsoft's general manager of virtualization, Mike Neil, said that he was in the process of interoperability discussions with Red Hat. The rumor is that Red Hat was holding out on principal that it would never agree to interoperability talks while Microsoft held to its claims about patent violations. Whether Red Hat simply got over itself or it stuck to its guns and made Microsoft admit in off-the-record conversations that Linux is no longer (and never has been) a target -- we'll never know. But maybe we don't have to know. Groklaw posted an interesting commentary:

"This is huge! Microsoft and Red Hat have signed a *patent-free* virtualization interoperability pact. ...Congratulations to Red Hat for refusing to buckle on this vital matter, and to Red Hat Legal for working out the details, and a tip of the hat to Microsoft, for facing reality and doing the right thing. And thank you, EU Commission, for creating a reality that makes it possible for the GPL to find a level playing field."

Pragmatic readers at Slashdot note that Red Hat didn't have a lot to loose -- but it had much to gain -- by interoperating with Windows. Some say that Red Hat's virtualization (a Xen implementation) is lagging behind the competition, namely Citrix, which makes sense given Citrix's acquired ownership of the commercial version of Xen, now called XenServer. Citrix's Xen has long since been interoperable with Hyper-V.

The press release says that Red Hat and Microsoft plan to validate future versions of virtualization products, too, but that's really an unknown. The .Net Developer's Journal notes that the wording is vague enough to throw some doubt on what will happen when Red Hat moves on to its own Qumranet-derived KVM hypervisor planned for RHEL 6.0.

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