Bits from the press about Novell and virtualisation for the most part. MANY people may not remember this, but Ron Hovsepian admitted giving power to Microsoft in the datacentres. It was part of the deal that Novell should permit Windows to run as a host and SUSE usually be a guest.

I'm set to interview Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian and Chief Marketing Officer/Channel Chief John Dragoon at the Novell BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City, Utah on March 22. Here are five key questions for Hovsepian and Dragoon, with the emphasis on the future of Novell and SUSE Linux.

There is a substantive effort in open source to bring such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell is that the intellectual property associated with that is available to Novell customers.

Novell's newly-appointed UK boss remarks on Microsoft's relationship with Novell

Novell's chief executive has justified his company's contentious Microsoft hook-up to open source devotees by claiming the deal is critical to the long-term success of their favorite operating system.

Recently, Novell Inc. has been the beneficiary of generally good news. First, Microsoft gave Novell the nod to write open source extensions to its new System Center, which signals Microsoft’s move toward greater interoperability. This will benefit all open source vendors, but Novell in particular, because these extensions are built on Novell’s ZENworks management software.

OK, so sometimes I'm wrong. Miguel de Icaza called out an error I made in criticizing Novell for its open-source strategy. I admit that I find it hard to see beyond Novell's patent pact with Microsoft but, as Miguel pointed out in a string of emails between us today (which he graciously allowed me to cite), this leaves out a lot that Novell does well.

RDN's Executive Editor, Features Jeffrey Schwartz talked about the Microsoft-Novell deal with Justin Steinman, Novell's director of product marketing for Linux and open platform solutions, at TecháEd. Steinman was involved in negotiating the terms of the deal and offers his insights on Microsoft's actions, the impact of the agreements on Linux development and more.

To many outsiders and to numerous sections of the open-source community, Novell's decision to make a deal with Microsoft in 2006 to avoid litigation around Linux was motivated by desperation.