Friday, November 24, 2006

Microsoft and Linux

If you are an Oracle expert or follower, you’ve probably been following Oracle’s Open World and its news. One of the biggest one was Oracle’s announcement of distribution and support of Red Hat Linux on October 26. This made the Linux Magazine to say “Oracle was predicted to make a big Linux announcement this week and you would be hard pressed to make a bigger one than this”.But I believe the second announcement from Microsoft and Novell that they would be working together on Linux wasn’t something less important than that.Yes, you red it right. Microsoft made a deal to be a distributor of Suse Linux, Novell's version of the operating system.Beyond the patent covenant and financial arrangements between them, it was revealed that, the two companies will work together on at least three projects.The companies will jointly develop a compelling virtualization offering for Linux and Windows. The result of which would enable Windows to run under Linux and Linux to run under Windows.
The two companies will be working together on Web Services.
And finally there will be an effort to create interoperability between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org file formats.Well, things are changing in the world of software development. I think we have to get ready for the time that .NET applications are fully portable to Linux.

Update (2013):

Mono has simply kept its promise of delivering a cross platform .NET development framework to this day. For example, we ported and recompiled an ASP.NET web application which was built with .NET framework 3.5 (utilizing many of its new features) and deployed onto a server running a CentOS linux.