Since forming in 2007, the vendor-neutral nonprofit consortium Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) has been working toward raising the awareness of open source in enterprise through a combination of education and marketing. As the group prepares to enter the new year, the OSA announced today that a new leadership team is poised to take over.

As part of CIO.com's series with the Chief Guys for each distribution explaining why theirs is the best for business, use, Roger Levy, senior vice president and general manager of Novell explains how SUSE Linux Enterprise helps customers lower costs, manage complexity and mitigate risk, clearly (he says) making it the best operating system for business today.

If you recall, Novell's former best friend for SUSE Linux was Microsoft. Microsoft and Novell have a partnership where the two parties had certificates that indemnified SUSE users from any intellectual property liability. In addition, Microsoft officially recommended SUSE Linux Enterprise for hybrid Windows/Linux shops.

Novell Inc. and Microsoft Corp., trying to expand the reach of their unusual alliance, say they plan to put a bigger emphasis on the Chinese market. The companies say they will make an extra investment to sell more support subscriptions for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system in China.

Novell will distribute portions of its SUSE Linux enterprise suite that fall under the GPLv3 license directly to customers who purchased certificates that would have entitled them to receive the software from Microsoft.

A global survey of open-source enterprise users of Alfresco software has found that deployments of Red Hat Linux have grown twice as fast as those for Novell SUSE Linux since Novell signed its controversial patent and interoperability agreement with Microsoft in November 2006.

Linux software vendor Novell Inc. of Waltham is expanding its alliance with Microsoft Corp. into China, in a bid to encourage Chinese companies to start paying for the software they use to run their businesses.

Microsoft’s current position, taken unilaterally, is intended to eliminate any perceived ambiguity about the applicability of GPLv3 to Microsoft.

In Novell's new SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP2, announced yesterday, you'll find only small, but useful, improvements, most of them for better interoperability with Microsoft protocols and formats.