Published at LXer:

How many SUSE subscriptions can you get for $240 million? Today I read a thought-provoking article over at SD Times, which detailed the state of the partnership between Novell and Microsoft. According to David Worthington's missive things are going pretty good for the two competitor/partners, though if you really read the piece there seems to be a key detail missing: what Microsoft is getting out of their investment in this partnership. And what an investment it has been: an initial payment of US$348 million to Novell... with US$240 million tagged specifically for those infamous subscription certificates for SUSE Enterprise Linux to hand out or resell to interested customers. Indeed, this was the thrust of the SD Times article: that Microsoft is almost through passing these coupons out. The thought that was actually provoked came from this sentence in the article: "A total of 475 customers have used an unspecified number of coupons, according to Microsoft."

Read More...