There is an article on Application Developer Trends at http://www.adtmag.com/article.aspx?id=20227 on the deal between Microsoft and Novell to cross license their technology and to indemnify each other from patent lawsuits. It sounds like they are on track to have something here in the next few months and that in the long term it will work out. I have to admit that I was a little dubious of the whole deal and I still think that Microsoft got the better end of the deal because they get to "play nice" with Linux while at the same time causing some problems for the #1 Linux distro. I thought that the Linux community would figure some way to squash the deal and it may still happen but I would like to see it go forward so I can run Linux on a Longhorn client.