After the patent indemnification agreement between Microsoft and Novell was closed, the open source community was surprised by the Microsoft officials with another announcement. Microsoft expressed their intentions of closing similar partnerships with other Linux vendors too, particularly with Red Hat.

The agreement between Microsoft and Novell included, apart from an interoperability pledge, a controversial intellectual property cross-licensing deal, too. Tom Robertson, general manager of interoperability standards with Microsoft stated a while ago that they intend to form a partnership with Red Hat for improving the interoperability of Windows and Linux.

"We are vendors in the same marketplace. We have made it clear that we would love to have a deal similar to the Novell deal in multiple respects. Microsoft would very much like to do a deal with Red Hat." claimed Microsoft official at that time .

Red Hat, on the other hand, claims it is not interested in this unless it is based on entire open standards, as the company's executive VP of engineering, Paul Cormier, stated for vunet.com:

"Interoperability done on closed APIs isn't interoperability. We'll never do interoperability based on closed APIs."

Even though Red Hat is known to be interested in improving the interoperability between their Linux distributions and Windows, company's officials claimed that Red Hat is not actually interested in a partnership similar to the one between Microsoft and Novell. The comments made by Timothy Yeaton, Red Hat's senior vice president of worldwide marketing comes to underline this:

"That challenge can be met by the work that we are doing with open standards. "It shouldn't require an agreement."

The partnership between Microsoft and Novell regards the SuSe Linux distribution and covers areas such as virtualization, Web services and document compatibility. The patent coverage is an interesting attempt to get Microsoft's commercial license to play nice with the GPL. As part of a patent cross licensing agreement, Microsoft will indemnify companies that purchase a license for Novell's SLES distribution for all its patents.