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.
A Microsoft spokesman responded: "SUSE has been, and continues to be, an important Microsoft partner. We anticipate that partnership will continue to generate many benefits for our joint customers. We have no comment on the status of contractual arrangements or discussions with SUSE."
The Germany-based SUSE, which is now operating out of its original headquarters in Nuremberg as an independent business unit of Micro Focus, has its own Azure deal with Microsoft, which is completely separate from the patent-licensing deal.
A SUSE spokesman told iTWire: "The announcement that Red Hat is available on Azure is not a surprise. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has been there for close to two years, and many enterprise customers are finding the benefits of deploying workloads on Linux in the public cloud.
"Red Hat's following SUSE into this space makes sense for joint Red Hat and Microsoft customers. Meanwhile, SUSE continues to work with Microsoft to create options for customers to run SUSE software alongside Microsoft solutions in on-premise and public and private cloud environments."
