Complete disengagement from Novell the better option for OpenSUSE?

For only a few hours yesterday, we had put this banner up at the top. At the advice of some people, including my co-editor Shane, it was pulled down. Nevertheless, now that OpenSUSE 11.0 is released, it's clear that some people hesitate or resent due to Novell's alliance with Microsoft. Here is an example from the beginning of Andrew Hudson's review at Linux Format:

Since the takeover by Novell and the subsequent patent covenant that Novell entered into with Microsoft, it's been a bit of a rough community ride for Novell's free and open source distribution. Although OpenSUSE itself is now well established, it's having to play catch up with Fedora which split from Red Hat Linux almost five years ago (before Novell even announced the SUSE acquisition).

Yet OpenSUSE often gets a bad wrap. There's that whole Novell/Microsoft/the world is ending conspiracy thing going on, for one thing. Certainly when Novell bought SuSE, it was disturbing. What were Novell's intentions? Where were things going to go from this point? Was openSUSE going to suffer for it?