The recently announced pact between Novell, publishers of SuSE Linux, and Microsoft, whose software empire is increasingly threatened by Linux and open source, has borne “fruit” in the form of “greater interoperability” between Novell’s version of OpenOffice and Microsoft Office document formats.

The Novell press release is here… it will be interesting to hear the reaction from the wider open source community since they have generally condemned the terms of the Novell/Microsoft agreement.

This is precisely the sort of “advance” that Novell claims the agreement makes possible. Criticism of the agreement has included issues raised about the possible effect of possible proprietary code additions open source software and the validity of Novell’s payment to Microsoft under the terms of the GNU public license.

This announcement will be carefully scrutinized and commented on by open source communities.

Cheers,
-pmh

Update [2006.12.06]:

I came across the following examples of the discussion taking place:

OpenOffice Blesses Microsoft-Novell Pact

Novell vs The World (The Geek Spot blog)

…and the latter links to some additional commentary.