The news regarding the agreement between Microsoft and Novell is not great for the OpenSource community; Microsoft appears to be trying either 1. to cover itself in the event that Linux/OpenSource pulls ahead and becomes popular on a profit threatening scale or 2. tying Novell/Suse into an agreement which will threaten Open Source itself. Microsoft has put forward Virtualisation and Application compatiblity as reasons for this agreement but that is mostly a smoke screen I fear. SLES is built on Open Source code and there is no reason for Microsoft to pay $100M+ to gain access to this testing function. This may also be a response to the Oracle annoucement rearding the provision of support for Red Hat. They will have to tread carefully though if they are to make a success of this yet remain within the bounds of the GPL license. If Microsoft are seen to have transferred/intermingled any OSS and MS software, then the GPL clearly states that the result is also bound by the GPL. So it’s a wait and see game …