During my dinner last night with both Microsoft’s interopability general managers Jean Paoli and Tom Robertson, the message was clear:

Would we like to do the same deal with Red Hat, absolutely!

and it gets even better,

We would do a deal tomorrow with Red Hat along the lines of the Novell deal

finally,

We would love to have all our customers to call on Red Hat to do the same deal. It's the responsible behaviour in the marketplace, it's the vendors getting together addressing the real need of their customers

So what's stopping Red Hat? The Linux distributor is now part of Microsoft's Interop Vendor Alliance. Plus, I'm sure Novell is receiving more from Microsoft than it gives back in royalties. So, if it's good for the customers, it should be good enough for Red Hat, right? So let's rock'n'roll!