Timothy Prickett Morgan reports from The Register this week that Red Hat and Microsoft have been coerced by customers into playing nice with each other
Operating system suppliers Red Hat, which is the leading commercial Linux distro by some measures, and Microsoft, the only maker of Windows, today announced a cross-platform support agreement that will allow operating systems from one to run on the hypervisors of the other.
The interoperability agreement has been forced on the two companies, which are not exactly natural allies or even particularly friendly even if they are mostly civil, by their respective customer bases, software partners, and resellers, explained Mike Evans, vice president of corporate development at Red Hat, and Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization strategy at Microsoft, in a Wwebcast [sic] this morning.
…[Red Hat’s Evans] explained that customers have been reading both vendors the riot act, and have said that they want to run mixed Windows and Linux environments and that they do not want to cope with hypervisor sprawl any more than they want server or operating system sprawl.