[KoRn]

What are your thoughts on this? What's the catch?

[ShadowAce]

I haven't figured it out yet. My initial reaction was that this is just the latest in the long line of mistakes by Novell management. I'm not sure what patents Novell thinks it needs to pay MS for--and vice versa.

It's possible that this is the first step in merging OS types so that we'll eventually get everyone working on variations on only one OS--kinda like how Linux and the BSDs are related.

These are just musings, though. I'll be watching this with some interest, anyway.

[ThePythonicCow]

The catch is that Microsoft thinks it can force its corporate users to use Novell SUSE, not some other Linux, in order to avoid the risk of patent lawsuits. This may be inviolation of the GPL v2 clause:

You may not impose any further restrictions on the rights granted by the GPL.

But going up against Microsoft lawyers on this matter would be much harder than going up against SCO lawyers.

It's classic Microsoft (what's the phrase commonly used?) embracing and suffocating of competition.