Microsoft has refused to say openly whether it will be extending the patent-licensing deal that it signed with Novell back in 2006. At that time, SUSE Linux was a part of Novell.

Novell has since been acquired by the Attachmate Group which, in turn, was bought by the British mainframe company Micro Focus.

In July 2011, Microsoft announced that the agreement with SUSE would be extended until January 1, 2016.

iTWire asked Microsoft about the SUSE agreement after Red Hat and Microsoft announced a deal a few days back on cloud installations, wherein Microsoft said it would be making Red Hat the preferred enterprise Linux distribution for installing on its Azure cloud offering.

The Microsoft-Novell deal — SUSE was then a part of Novell — was initially signed in 2006 and, after its initial five-year term, was renewed in July 2011 for a further five years until the end of 2015. It has hardly two months left to run.

There has been no word from either SUSE or Microsoft on what happens next. SUSE's leaders are currently in Amsterdam attending the company's annual national conference.

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• UK Government Looks To Open Source Software

Three months have passed since Microsoft launched its new OS, the Windows 10, which will be the last edition of Windows. This means that, from now on, the developers will release only updates and will continue to improve this platform. But what did Windows 10 bring new? Of course, many features. But are they… new, or inspired from other OS? Let’s see what Microsoft stole from Linux.