And then Ballmer spoke and the Linux community became afraid...

(Article Here)

Quite a firestorm this thing has become. Here I thought that the Novell partnership was straightforward, that MS was finally doing something smart and that all of us would actually reap the benefits of Linux running Windows. Then Ballmer opened his mouth and all Hell hath broken loose...

If you read the original comments(found here) I think there are some interesting points that Ballmer is making and that its not all as alarmist as one might think.

My two cents:

Ballmer talks about interoperability first then makes the comment about Novell having paid MS for their intellectual property. He also talks about the way GPL is structured and that MS has to get money for their intellectual property.

The assumption is that he's talking about Linux stealing MS' IP, but I don't think this is even what he was talking about. Read the paragraph before the comments and what he's saying. I believe he means that MS can't be fully interoperable with Linux as is because they're not about to make any part of Windows open to GPL.

MS might have a real point here. I'm not a Linux expert, but one has to ask: are there pieces of Linux that deal with Windows interoperability that were reversed engineered and distributed with the kernel? Are there any services dealing with directories, printing, or networking that were maybe MS proprietary but easily decoded?

So, in order to have "true" interoperability, one of the Linux vendors had to cut a deal with MS. So Novell does the deed.

Moving forward SUSE is going to have interoperability with Windows. And you know what will happen - someone will release it to the rest of the open source community (which is what the open source community does well) and then - THEN you have the problems that Ballmer was discussing with the liability in the datacenter when some admin compiles himself a new Windows Interop package and runs it on a "non compliant" Linux.

Once something like that happens, MS can do nothing about it. Its one of the classic drawbacks of open source - who do you sue when things go wrong? Microsoft wants to get working on/with Linux and knows they can't make money off of it if they open it up, so they've taken this approach: get someone to pony up for it, and once its released to the open source communtiy, sue anyone who runs Windows on an unapproved Linux. I'm actually impressed with MS' foresight in this one. I'm not even sure that the Linux community sees it just yet.

Its definately going to be interesting to see what happens.