Novell has made a filing to the US Securities and Excahnge Commission which includes financial details of its deal with Microsoft so it has also posted them here. Apart from the money, the most interesting bit of news is that this is a Novell exclusive deal:
Additionally, under the business collaboration agreement, Microsoft agreed that for three years, it will not enter into an agreement with another Linux distributor to encourage adoption of Linux/Windows virtualization solutions through a Linux subscription certificate program.
This makes sense in the context of how I expect the deal will actually work. For example, if a Microsoft salesman has a customer who wants to run Windows and Linux together, the customer might be a Red Hat user. In that case, the salesman can say, "Hey that's cool, but we have a development agreement with Novell, so we'd be happier if you used SuSE Enterprise for that. Why pay Red Hat $3,000 (or whatever), I can give you a SuSE coupon that gets you a year's free Novell support!"
The coupon also includes a promise that Microsoft won't sue the customer should his Novell installation infringe any Microsoft software patents. Whether that's actually worth much is another issue. Microsoft isn't actually run by crazies like the RIAA.
There's also a page where Novell Answers Questions from the [open source] Community, which will grow as more questions arrive.
