The later announcement of the Novell/Microsoft partnership is another example of the attacks that Red Hat is facing, the previous one was from Oracle.

Red Hat is the current leader in the commercial Linux server market, and Novell is a very distant second. This is just Novell trying to join forces to attack a common enemy. I never trusted them as a real Open Source business, they only bought Suse because their proprietary OS was dying, in order to be able to continue selling their other proprietary offerings. In contrast Red Hat buys closed source applications and make all the changes needed to open source them, for example Fedora/Red Hat Directory Server based on its powerful predecessor, Netscape Directory Server; meanwhile Novell do not open source their core business. Novell buys Ximian for their .Net clone Mono, a dangerous proposition because MS will always be there as the only director of .Net future; Red Hat instead invest in a free Java implementation (GCJ/GNU Classpath). I hadn't bought any Linux product from Novell, and now it seems more improbable.

Finally I don't want to forget to talk about the crazy Oracle idea, do they really think that I will pay for support for a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone to someone that has no expertize on OS development, that will give me security updates after Red Hat has done the job (with a delay), and that is not able to implement a decent JEE application server and that their support service recommends temporal hacks and do not solve the real issues on the application server... Yes Suuuuuure.

Update: Red Hat responds