The drivers themselves are “pay for” and “proprietary” and can’t be opensourced because they were developed with the Microsoft DDK and the licensing minefield therein. Of course, for a pure linux shop it’s a moot point because these drivers are of no use to you unless you already have the license for Windows.

And no, the Windows drivers are not for free as a recent announcement of Novell states here http://www.novell.com/news/press/novell-ships-suse-linux-enterprise-10-service-pack-1-and-new-virtual-machine-driver-pack/

As the optimized Xen drivers for Windows are developed in cooperation with Microsoft they cannot (or are not allowed to be) open sourced. But as a Linux only user one would not be interested in such drivers so you do not have to spend money on something you do not need. I suggest that is also the reason the drivers pack is a separate offering, not every SLES user will use their server for virtualising Windows. This is the way to track who does, adn as you do not want a lame Virtual Windows server after every patch Tuesday, there’s driver maintenance included. Btw XenSource also for this reason has an agreement with Microsoft for a) the drivers and b) Microsoft allowing Windows to be run virtual using XenSource products. The fact that things -can- be done does not mean it is allowed by Microsoft, that also goes for VMware.

‘Among those reasons is Novell’s willingness to make GNU/Linux secondary to Windows in the datacentre.’
I do not see what’s bad in that, there seem to be customers that need it. If I do run VMware server on my Windows workstation and make a virtual machine running Linux, that would be the exact same thing. Are we now going to boycott VMWare for having -that ability-?

So, it’s still a mixed source company, having both open source and closed source solutions. As there is a clear reason why the Xen drivers for Windows are not open sourced and not for free that does not make Novell ‘stuck in it’s proprietary roots’. Think this is as Novell states it about choise.