thank you for the kind comments on my talk. I do understand the concerns regarding whether "unprecedented customer value" can be provided by our relationship with Microsoft. Obviously that is left, marketing slides aside, to the evaluation of the customers themselves. I would say that our desire is to provide concrete interoperability value in a couple of key areas, virtualization, identity and access management, systems administration, etc. that can use additional work in terms of getting heterogeneous systems to work together. Whether we are going to execute has been a question from just about anyone we've talked to about this from day 1, as our industry is littered by grandiose announcements that dissipated into presentation vapor. I think it's completely fair to judge the value we create among other items by the results of the collaboration in these areas.

The other comment you make is about the complexity of FLOSS licensing. I certainly did not mean to imply that proprietary licensing is easy or simple. Both as a consumer and a vendor of proprietary software in my past, I understand how complicated it can be (and how some agreements, if challenged in court, would probably not even pass the laugh test). But, FLOSS licensing is not completely trivial, especially more for developers in mixed environments (for example in technology partnerships) than for pure open source developers or even consumers, and the context of the comment was specifically about technology collaboration efforts. Our business unit in Novell essentially works in open source, which simplifies things a fair bit. But as I see our systems and identity management partners in Novell use open source projects, or transform proprietary software into open source (hundreds of projects already done), or combine open and proprietary elements into a solution by ourselves or with partners, we all pay a lot of attention that we neither place ourselves into a corner nor we in any way violate the licenses that we are committed to respect or want to use by the way we put together the solutions. So, yes, it is complex, but I did not mean to imply that it is either a completely new issue or a barrier to doing innovative development of solutions. Just the opposite and we are betting our livelihood on our ability to excel at it.