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emember the Xandrospire transition? all started with the claim from a man who had sold out to Microsoft, Kevin Carmony. He bragged about the money he had made by signing a deal against the GPL (and with Microsoft). Mark Hinkle seems to have it confirmed now, so it's no longer an unsubstantiated claim/rumours. Just look how far back it goes.

According to Typaldos Xandros and Linspire have had talks at the CEO level over the years about the possibility of a combination given their historically similar Debian-based roots and complementary product lines. Such talks accelerated in late 2007 and culminated in the current agreement.

[...]

Xandros is one of the more established Linux distributions evolving originally from Corel Linux popular in the late 1990s.

Corel is the company that Microsoft paid to essentially stop competing and instead serve Microsoft. It's similar to Novell's deal. Having become too much of a threat to Microsoft's franchise, the monopoly realised that it would be cheaper to 'bribe' the opponent to concede the fight. This type of interference was first described as harmony by Corel, so regulators could not express much skepticism.

Remember how Corel promised that it would be committed to Linux. It's the same with Novell and Free software. But Novell is now putting Microsoft before siblings like Red Hat. Its commitment to Free software comes only after its commitment to Microsoft. ⬆

"Our partnership with Microsoft continues to expand."

--Ron Hovsepian, Novell CEO