Novell and RedHat have joined IBM’s strategic alliance,

their highest tier partner status.  IBM

have said that the strengthened alliance will allow users to obtain standards

based Linux hardware, software and service through integrated channels.  Customers will be able to purchase one and

three year Linux support subscriptions for the Linux operating system on both

IBM and non-IBM hardware.  Suse Linux

Enterprise Server will certify IBM’s version of Apache Geronimo—an open source

J2EE application server Websphere Community Edition.