[sf-lug] Great News: IBM, Novell join forces

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Sameer Verma (sverma at sfsu.edu):

> Something about a "frying pan and fire" come to mind...

Indeed. 

If the only choices we're offered are the 1990s dead-end development
platform from Hell (Lotus Notes) or some IBM-developed betaware Java
office suite, I think I just might give up on computers and retreat to
my dad's slide rule.

Of course, the scary thing is, the "enterprise" market really _does_
take that sort of thing seriously -- along with Micrsoft Sharepoint and
worse things.

Anyhow, before assuming that a "partnership" announcement has any
substance to it, one needs to see what resources -- especially money --
are going to get actually deployed.  In this case, the substance is a
series of essentially no-money distribution deals, most of it revolving
around a vaguely defined brand called "Open Collaboration Client Solution
(OCCS)", which you only _think_ is a specific piece of software, but you
eventually find is an umbrella product-idea / marketing concept that can
include one or more of: Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime, IBM WebSphere
Portal 6.0, IBM Lotus Quickr, IBM Lotus Connections, Lotus Expeditor
(a proprietary superset of Eclipse Rich Client Platform), and the new
Java thing, the newly named Lotus Symphony office suite (formerly IBM
Workplace.)  Some but not all of those codebases are free of charge;
_none_ of them is open source.  Nary a one.  So, please take all the
weasel-wording about "open computing" and "open standards" cum granum
salis.

Red Hat have agreed to offer various OCCS pieces, plus IBM Domino 8
server, bundled with RHEL in their enterprise sales channels.  

Canonical have agreed to offer OCCS and Notes stuff in Ubuntu packaging
to their customers.

Novell have made a similar marketing deal for SLED/SLES users.