The MS/Novell deal caused a pretty big disturbance in the FOSS community. I know that this has been covered many times on a lot of web sites but I just wanted to give my personal point of view and I'll make it as short as possible :)
MS saw for the past 5 years or so that it's losing market share to Linux in the enterprise market and it will continue to lose. Now that they have a deal with one of the major companies that are involved in Enterprise Linux, they can use it to split the FOSS community in two. On one side you'll have the commercial FOSS developers who will be "protected" by this agreement between Novell & MS. On the other side you'll have the non-commercial guy who is contributing to the FOSS community but is not "protected" by MS in any way.
That is what MS is looking for. Once they split the FOSS community in two, which they are trying to do that right now using their contract with Novell to spread FUD that they can sue you if you don't use SUSE products, it will be much easier for them to control the commercial side of Linux trough Novell's SLES/SLED products. When they accomplish this, they can stab Novell in the back by breaking the contract thus making it very easy to enforce their patents if Novell decides to insert some MS code into their products during the contracts period.
I just fail to see how this deal could be good for Novell or the FOSS community in general.
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