Dell Signs on With Microsoft, Novell

This seems pretty substantial. Contrasting this will the old Microsoft emails stressing incompatibility with Linux is amazing. Clearly Microsoft is doing things to changing their reputation.

To encourage more companies to choose Novell's open-source platform, Microsoft has promised not to file patent-rights lawsuits over any of its technology that's blended with Suse Linux.

Although Microsoft has done this before with companies like Apple, I don't see why Microsoft is encouraging the use of competing software.

Actually - this is a classic Microsoft manuever - Novell struck a deal with the devil so to speak, because they are rapidly losing enterprise market share to Microsoft. This in turn allows Microsoft a front in its battle with Linux, where they can drive the SUSE version, use Dell to front it to the enterprise, regain market share from the open source Linux distro, go proprietary and lock down.

This is why the open source movement has been so critical of the Novell move in supporting Microsoft.

In my opinion this doesn't make sense. Dell already offers (or will offer) Ubuntu Linux for some of their makes, so why buy up SuSE?

i hope that microsoft is not doing this just for publicity sake...