I find it pretty hilarious what's happening now. Wal-Mart is now planning to buy SuSE support vouchers from Microsoft. to build a web project. The fact that Wal-Mart is going to use SuSE is not so surpising, but that Microsoft is selling the vouchers is what makes it funny.

Microsoft had these support vouchers from being in partnership with Novell, which formed a few months ago. Microsoft was trying to get rid of them, so they're hoping to sell them to Wal-Mart. But why? I would expect Microsoft to want Wal-Mart to use MS software, just like any other company would. Instead they're supporting Novell, which is pretty ironic.

In fact, it's pretty ironic that Microsoft even partnered with Novell in the first place. Maybe they were trying to gain some money through the open-source community. Anyway, I'm not an expert, so I don't really know how well the partnership is going between Microsoft and Novell. But judging by the way Wal-Mart is eyeing up those vouchers, I'd guess that it's not going quite as well as expected.

It's not as if Wal-Mart isn't using Linux already. They've been using Red Hat for a while, which is not surprising for large corporations, as well as Windows servers. They'll somehow add the SuSE server packages to the whole works.

But what amazes me is that Microsoft is selling vouchers for Linux, not Windows. As I said before, I'm not an expert, but there's a chance that Microsoft might aquire Novell, given the cosieness of the 2 companies together. Wouldn't that be funny. Anyway, I'm interested to see how this deal works out.