In a shock announcement, Microsoft has today taken majority ownership of software house Novell. This immediately gives the Redmond giant control of Novell's intellectual property assets including the legal copyright over UNIX.

Microsoft and Linux distributor Xandros on June 4 signed a broad set of collaboration and patent agreements that reminded many of the November 2006 Microsoft/Novell partnership. What do analysts and other Linux vendors think this new deal means for Linux?

Novell promotes patent encumbrances with Microsoft, Xandros helps Windows again, and the SFLC warns about Melco

You may know of Xandros Linux; for many people exposure came through the Eee PC, with this being the distro chosen by Linux-turncoat ASUS. Yet, what is Xandros' stance on open source software? Might Xandros be a thinly-veiled Microsoft tout as Linspire reborn?

Techtarget.com may be delivering this news a little too late, but it incorporates some quotes which the publisher sought from Red Hat, Xandros, Novell and some so-called ‘analyst’.

Microsoft's partnership with Novell got a lot of people in the open-source community fired up. Since then, Microsoft's Linux deals with Linspire and Xandros have just thrown gasoline on the fire. Now, it appears that Red Hat, the leading Linux company and the most vocal opponent to Microsoft wheeling and dealing, tried to make its own deal with Microsoft before the Novell one was released.

Mono is an open source project led by Novell to create a .NET-compatible set of tools that include, among others, a C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime. Mono can be run on Linux, BSD, UNIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Windows operating systems.

Novell's ownership of UNIX leads to increasingly-prevalent concern that UNIX is not in safe hands; Novell promises to appeal the WordPerfect ruling

More Mono news and changes in Novell's staff .