The exact same week that Microsoft issued a press release supplying additional details about some of the technological advancements that may outcome in the November 2006 technology agreement in between Novell and Microsoft, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer informed Wall Road what he seriously thinks the deal implies to Microsoft. In the course of a forecast update meeting for monetary analysts and shareholders on February fifteen,
Office Pro 2007, Ballmer reiterated that,
Office 2010 Serial, to him, the offer is extra about Microsoft exerting intellectual house (IP) strain on Novell than something else. Ballmer didn't talk up technological cross-collaboration. He didn't mention helping customers with interoperability challenges. He didn't mention new sales opportunities. Instead, he said: "The offer that we announced at the finish of last year with Novell I consider to be quite important. It demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual house even inside the Open Source world. I would not anticipate that we make a huge additional revenue stream from our Novell deal, but I do think it clearly establishes that Open Source is not free and Open Source will have to respect intellectual residence rights of others just as any other competitor will." Ballmer has riled the Novell management team extra than once by hinting that Microsoft believes that Novell and other open-source vendors are violating Microsoft patents. (This past weekend,
Microsoft Office 2010 Pro, in an interview with LinuxWorld, former Novell employee and lead Samba developer Jeremy Allison, when asked about supposed Microsoft threats over alleged open-source patent violations,
Office 2007 Ultimate Key, said the rumors were true. "I have had people come up to me and essentially off the record admit that they had been threatened by Microsoft and had got patent cross license and had essentially taken out a license for Microsoft patents on the free software that they were using, which they then cannot redistribute. I think that would be the restriction. I would have to look quite carefully. So, essentially that’s not allowed. But they’re not telling anyone about it. They’re completely doing it off the record," Allison said.) Until customers come forward and admit these Microsoft threats, it's gong to be tough to prove Allison's contention. But it isn't difficult to see that Microsoft's brass sees the Microsoft-Novell deal as being, above all else,
Windows 7 32bit, about setting a precedent by getting an open-source vendor to pay royalties for IP.