Novell today is rolling out the newest edition of its flagship enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 11. The new releases are the first major updates since the SLES and SLED 10 releases in July of 2006 and are the first enterprise Linux distro's to ever support Mono - .NET on Linux

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) is perhaps best known as the distro whose owner Novell, in 2005, signed an extremely unpopular patent-protection deal with Microsoft. From that moment on, Novell was essentially dead to those that prize the free software aspects of Linux.
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An investigation of the latest patent news and how it relates to Novell, Microsoft

Novell still uses software patents protection as a business proposition to users of SUSE

Novell has released a new product based on Mono 2.4, the SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension, which provides commercial support for running .NET applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Novell does not want people to think that Microsoft has already acquired it; littering of YouTube resumes

"Someone at Microsoft has a sense of humour..." And the successor to Vista named GNU.NET ?:)

Novell only makes publicly available to anyone, in free access (here and here), only the source code for the packages "as of release", e.g. as on the physical media for SLED 10 SP2, for instance! There is no way to get the sources for the updated packages, unless you're a customer!... Is this GPL-compliant? IANAL, but based on the GPL Compliance Guide, it looks like it's not.

New truths about Novell: inconsistency in reports (possible SEC violation), losses on desktop Linux (SLED)