A ZDNet artical (02/11/06) explained the agreement between Novell and Microsoft. Its no wonder the Open Source and FSF community are suspicious. As the artical puts it these 'foes' are indeed forming an alliance, but against what? Is the alliance to deal with the (Microsoft's) customer demands as mentioned by Brad Smith? Is it to stave off the rise of CentOS and its counter part RedHat? With the biggest software company in the world plugging your software and optimising it to run on their software then which other linux vendor is getting squeezed?