Dell has joined MSFT & NOVL to make the Linux/Windows interoperability duad into a triad. The basic reason seems to be as the two companies said when they announced the deal last Fall: "Hey, the customers are beating us up on this one."

Dell's Becker said that the interoperability work Microsoft and Novell are doing between Windows and Linux will radically reduce the complexity for customers deploying heterogeneous environments. Those customers want to be able to deploy their application stacks on both Windows and Linux without any concerns or ramifications from the operating system providers, he said.

Dell also emphasized the guarantees of no-IP violations, a part of the agreement that has the FSF wing of the FOSS movement in a particular fury.

"Our customers have also told us that IP assurance is a very big issue for them, and they want to know that Dell and our partners will all stand behind the products we sell. So now we can, with confidence, extend the assurance and peace of mind that our customers are asking for when deploying both Windows and Linux into their data center," Becker said.

This poses an interesting competitive challenge for the non-Novell portion of the FOSS community. As the fights over the GPLv3 show, a fundamental characteristic of the FOSS movement is that it is producer-driven -- what do the programmers want and need? -- rather than customer driven. This has some advantages, obviously, in terms of mobilizing producers. But quare whether the producer-oriented model can respond to the demands of the marketplace when confronted with competitive challenge.

So far, the impulse of the FOSS movement has been to use GPLv3 to torpedo the MSFT-NOVL deal and discourage interoperability, not exactly a customer-friendly strategy. One of the interesting implications of the Dell announcement is that Dell must be writing off the possiblity that GPLv3 will be adopted for Linux. Or it is willing to support a fork into v2 and v3 versions.