"I've heard from Novell sales representatives that Microsoft sales executives have started calling the Suse Linux Enterprise Server coupons "royalty payments""

--Matt Asay, April 21^st, 2008

The headline is just a game of words and nothing personal, but mind the following take on OpenSolaris, courtesy of OpenSUSE's community manager:

Ultimately, I can’t help but think that the problem that Sun is trying to solve with OpenSolaris is not a technical one, but one of control. Specifically, the company is not ready to cede control over its operating system to the community at large, and so it is instead trying to build a community around OpenSolaris rather than joining the larger Linux effort.

Look who's talking.

Novell too tries to control GNU/Linux using Mono and copyrights, as well as an exclusionary software patent deal that covers Mono, among other things.

Unless you're from Novell (or one of Novell's paying customers), avoid Mono at all costs. We've been through many other reasons for this before.

Herein we find yet another reason (among more recent ones [1, 2, 3, 4]) for Sun to keep its distance from Novell/SUSE and hopefully maintain a good relationship with companies like Canonical. Novell is with Microsoft now, working on its digital island to gain greater control over components of GNU/Linux distributions and offer exclusive coupons (Microsoft openly calls these "patent royalties" now) for these crucial components. ⬆