Context
Events like this deal occur in a context. It's instructive to review the context of the Microsoft-Novell deal.
Just days earlier, Oracle had announced that it would be rebranding Red Hat Linux and providing its own support at half the price of Red Hat's, posing a threat to Red Hat and possibly threatening to fork the Linux code base.
Microsoft was trying to prove compliance with the ruling against it in the 2004 antitrust suit, a suit in which it had used its claimed interoperability efforts as part of defense.
Microsoft had been behaving very differently toward Linux and open-source software compared to the days when Steve Ballmer was calling it communistic. Now, Microsoft had a Linux Lab and was focusing a lot of effort on Windows-Linux interoperability. The company set up its Linux Lab in Redmond in September of 2005, and although this may have initially been mostly about sussing out the enemy, it had become more about genuine efforts to promote interoperability. What Microsoft meant by interoperability might not be exactly what anyone else meant by the term, though.
Part of what it meant was virtualization: Xen, a hot virtualization platform (or hypervisor), was added to SUSE Linux in early November, and Microsoft has said it will provide support for Xen and SUSE Linux for users of its Windows Server hypervisor.
Anyone thinking that Microsoft had decided to play nice with Linux, though, need look no further than the SCO-IBM suit. SCO had litigated itself nearly into oblivion trying to assert a questionable IP claim in Linux, and many believe that SCO was, or became, a proxy for Microsoft in Microsoft's efforts to undermine Linux by any means possible.
Linux had become a force that Microsoft had to reckon with. Linux was winning contracts that Microsoft wanted and winning the hearts and minds of developers.
At the same time, there were contentious issues in the Linux community. When Novell bought SUSE in 2003, IBM (fervently committed to Linux but concerned about one vendor becoming too dominant) joined in as a minority investor specifically to promote SUSE as a counterbalance to Red Hat.
The upcoming version 3 of the GNU Public License was not popular with the Linux community and probably was going to be in serious trouble if its drafters didn't back off on some of its more contentious new provisions. Then, almost simultaneously with the Microsoft-Novell deal, Sun open-sourced Java under the GPL.
The context of the deal would also include somewhat similar deals that Microsoft made with Sun and Apple in the past, and how those worked out for the parties involved. And, I think, Microsoft's deals with IBM from the early days of the personal computer revolution are relevant, in a cautionary way. OS/2 developers know what I mean.
