Perhaps Apple is involved in this?

After all, Jobs is now busily attacking the Googlesaurus after building up his "oh so scary" $40B war chest. However, all of Apple products are based on BSD Unix. This could potentially leave Jobs in a rather vulnerable position, considering his now coming out of the closet and proclaiming himself the One and Only Rightful God (of Smartphones, and Ipads, and...).

Novell seems to own the patent rights to Unix, and has been a benevolent holder of these rights so far, agreeing not to litigate against BSD and other Unix variants (particularly when they agreed to remove some legacy code). So perhaps Elliot is a “middle-man” who could safely shield Apple from this kind of attack, or later choose to conveniently lose the Unix patents to Jobs during a poker game. Considering Jobs aggressive, narcissistic behaviour, I don't think that his owning or controlling the patents to Unix would be in the world's best interest. He is obviously not interested in sharing his toys (and Microsoft wouldn't be much better at this).

Of course, Google -- who is a friend to open source and Novell, as well as a great employer -- could choose to pick up Novell. This would position Google in a great spot to extend its cloud into both the commercial and residential space. Then the real fun could begin for Jobs and Co. Would serve him right, IMHO.

I just hope that -- whatever happens -- OpenSuse stays open and free -- its a great Linux distribution.