Moblin + Novell = ... Novlin?Moblin + Novell = ... Novlin?

Okay, so I'm bad at portmanteaus. But here we have a buddying-up between two corporate outfits with more than a tentative involvement in open source, even if the exact terms of the deal are still rather vague.

From the press release that crossed the wire: "Novell ... announced it will create a Moblin-based product for netbooks that it will take to market to a wide range of OEMs and ODMs." At a guess: a scaled down / "Moblin-ized" version of SUSE that connects seamlessly to Windows domains and the like? I'm probably dead off the mark with this one, but that's my best guess given what Novell's been known for with its Linux work.

What's most striking about this is how it it's further evidence of open source being a way for companies to collude where before they might not have had any common ground. This isn't to say that Intel and Novell were competing in any significant way before, but that they've now found a common place in which to pool strengths and both come away as winners. That place is provided by open source.

Most people are seeing this collusion as a sign of how open source is a game-changer in the mobile market. That's obvious. I'm also seeing it as a game-changer for allowing companies that might not normally have worked together to collude, to blend strengths that each might have kept to themselves before. It's obviously not going to make rival companies any less rivals, but I'm curious to see how this'll serve to forge alliances where others might not have sprung up over closed source.

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