Microsoft buying $240 million worth of SUSE Linux

The agreement between Novell and Microsoft is actually three agreements, and one of them will see Microsoft buying $240 million of SUSE Linux certificates. New details about the deal surfaced yesterday in a Novell filing with the SEC, where the company spelled out the financial arrangements in detail.

The two companies have actually signed three separate agreements: a Business Collaboration Agreement, a Technical Collaboration Agreement, and a Patent Cooperation Agreement. All three deals are designed to make virtualization simpler, something we suspected when the announcement was first made. The agreement on technical collaboration requires both companies to make sure that their respective operating systems run well as guest systems, and both have agreed to make it easy for each operating system to "command, control, and configure" the other OS in a virtual machine environment. The two firms will also work on interoperability between the ODF and Office Open XML file formats.