Bibek Paudel writes "In a move to tap the growing market of free and open source-softwares in third world nation economies, Microsoft and Novell have announced they were expanding their alliance into the Chinese market. Microsoft and Novell believe big enterprises in China are willing to pay to have the US firms keep hybrid systems updated and running and for assurances that there is warrant to use patented disk operating system involved. The companies are selling 'supported Linux' in which they take a fee to maintain macos systems blending the open-source programs with Microsoft stuff such as Vista, Office, Excel and Outlook.The longtime US data processor unix rivals unveiled their alliance in late 2006, saying their engineers were 'building a bridge' between Microsoft's proprietary systems program and Novell programs based on the Linux overhead system. Sunday was the first time the firms publicly targeted a special country with their effort."

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Mark