It’s clear that Microsoft’s strategy on dealing with open source has a split-personality problem. Without dropping a beat after the company’s announced Linux partnership with Novell, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reasserted Microsoft’s legal challenges to Linux, and claimed that Novell’s agreement conceded that Microsoft’s intellectual property is infringed by parts of the open-source operating system.

Steve Ballmer and Co. have long been hostile to the Linux community, while at the same time trying to capture more developers to the Windows camp by using a variety of community licenses and pushing some components of the Windows and .NET development architecture as “open” standards through ECMA and other standards bodies.

The recent announcement of a strategic partnership with Novell and its SuSE Linux unit, which appears to be focused on improving compatibility between Windows and Linux networking, isn’t really a deviation from that path. Both Novell and Microsoft are seeking to make enterprise server virtualization customers happy, while Microsoft is still trying to find a way to snuff Linux as a competitor.

The same sort of customer-driven concerns were at the heart of Microsoft’s deal last year with Sun, which ended Sun’s Java lawsuit against Microsoft — Scott McNealy and Steve Ballmer both said enterprise customer demands for things like better compatibility between Sun’s LDAP-based enterprise directory services and Microsoft’s ActiveDirectory helped push them to the table.

Novell needs a competitive edge over Red Hat with big customers, and this agreement might help. In the long run, Novell gets better support for Windows virtual sessions running on SuSE servers, and Microsoft perhaps gets better support for Linux sessions running on its own Windows-based virtualization platform. But the real question is whether there is a long run for Novell, and whether there’s any real value for customers and the channel in the deal. Most of the reaction thus far has been lukewarm at best– and the propaganda value to Microsoft in its FUD war on Linux as a whole has gotten more of a boost than anything else.

Various constituencies have been nagging Sun Microsystems to open-source the Java platform since almost the day it was launched. Former CEO and current chairman Scott McNealy had resisted for a long time, challenging IBM to open-source DB2 when IBM execs chided Sun on the open source issue. Then Sun created its own open-source license — CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License)–and used it for the Solaris OS and for Glassfish, an implementation of Java Enterprise Edition. and Jonathan Schwartz promised Java would follow Solaris into the open world.

And now, Sun has delivered–the entire Java family has been open-sourced under the GNU Public License version 2.0. That means that Java can now live peacefully with other software distributions that fall under the GPL, such as Linux, without barriers to free redistribution.

The first thing this means to the channel is that resellers, integrators and ISVs can now build fully-blessed Java applications and integration software without royalties. Sun is still providing for a commercial license of Java that provides indemnification for customers, but having the entire code base in GPL open source means that people can develop new mobile, desktop and server applications and distribute them–and that open-source projects based on the GPL can incorporate Java into their code without legal fears.

As the ship date for Microsoft. Corp.’s Windows Vista operating system grows closer, the marketing to both end-users and solution providers gets more intense – and not only from Redmond. CDW Corp., for example, released a report this morning predicting that 86% of U.S. companies expect to adopt Windows Vista, with a total of 20% of organizations doing so within 12 months. The 86% figure sounds impressive, but ultimately it means that fewer companies are currently planning to upgrade to Vista than are currently running on Windows. It turns out saying “eventually” was a way of touting the most optimistic figure without being too precise about saying either how fast people will upgrade, or whether they ultimately have a choice.

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