"In November 2006 Novell and Microsoft singed and announced a collaboration agreement between them, which took the Linux world by surprise. Novell is the owner and producer of SUSE Linux which it acquired in 2003.
Novell is also the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights, which was recently confirmed by a US court, which in itself is a welcome victory, because of SCO’s threat to the Linux community based upon allegations of copyright infringement of UNIX. SCO claimed that Linux is an unauthorized derivative of UNIX and sued IBM and Novell over copyright claims. And then there were speculations, that Microsoft helped SCO in its effort against Linux. But after all, Microsoft perhaps realized that SCO is going to loose and it was them, which suddenly needed protection from Novell, hence the collaboration agreement with Novell. And the deal includes a patent cooperation agreement, where Novell and Microsoft each promised not to sue the other’s customers for patent infringement..."
