Novell had been struggling financially and failing to make much ground against open-source rival Red Hat. The deal that the company signed with Microsoft, which cost Novell some $40m (£20m), to avoid Suse customers being sued, meant that the two companies would promote each others products. Since then, Novell has realised a significant amount of revenue from being Microsoft's Linux provider of choice and saw its sales in this area rise by 65 percent in the last quarter.

Unsurprisingly, Novell's chief executive, Ron Hovsepian, does not see his company as desperate or a traitor to the open-source community, which it bought into with its 2003 acquisition of Suse Linux. Rather, Hovsepian believes Novell is a brave innovator, walking the line between old-world proprietary companies and disruptive open-source players. He claims Novell is all about building bridges and that, in reality, businesses are not interested in the binary thinking that afflicts many open-source enthusiasts — it is not about Microsoft being good and open source being bad, but "making IT work as one".

Speaking to the Novell boss at his company's annual BrainShare user conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, ZDNet.co.uk asked whether the Microsoft deal could actually be damaging in the long run and what effect a financial downturn could have on Novell's recent recovery.

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