The two-year anniversary of the Novell-Microsoft alliance that scandalized the open source community passed quietly enough earlier this month.

The pair waited a couple of weeks to mark the occasion and then said that in the second year of their arrangement they added upwards of 200 new joint customers, including BP Oil International and China Mobile, which are getting certificates from Microsoft for three-year priority support subscriptions to Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Microsoft continues to maintain that it brings the customer "IP peace of mind" because of its promise not to sue for patent infringement.

Thanking its lucky stars, Novell claims customer response has exceeded expectations and allowed that this peace of mind had something to do with it - even though it has previous abjured Microsoft's IP claims.

When the five-year agreement was signed in November 2006, Microsoft bought certificates to sell to customers, which then redeemed those certificates with Novell for a subscription to SUSE.

The move made a big revenue difference to Novell, which has now invoiced more than 70% of the original certificate purchase.

Microsoft says it's supporting Novell's new migration-minded Expanded Support program that lets customers transition to SUSE over a two-year period while getting technical support for third-party Linux deployments from Novell. Microsoft will sell certificates for the Novell technical support.

So take that Red Hat.

The companies also said to expect the beta of Moonlight 1.0 any time now. That of course is the open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight that should give Linux users the same rich, high-definition media capabilities currently available for the Windows and Apple environments.

Moonlight will appear as an open source plug-in for the Firefox browser.

Then there's this Advanced Management Pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 thing.

It's supposed to be available in the first half of next year, long about the time Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 is released and is supposed to make managing mixed environment easier.

It extends the cross-platform Linux monitoring capability of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 and enables the assessment and management of Windows- and Linux-based servers from a single console, eliminating the costs and complexities of having multiple management consoles.