The 12 new customers brings to 17 the number of end user organizations that have gone on the record as accepting coupons for SUSE Linux Enterprise support from Microsoft, while Dell also recently signed up to resell the coupons on Microsoft’s behalf.

Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and AIG Technologies signed up in December 2006, a month after the scheme was announced, while Wal-Mart came on board in January and HSBC in March.

Now added to that list are: 1blu, Arsys, Fujitsu Services, Gordon Food Service, Gulfstream Aerospace, hi5 Networks, Host Europe, Nationwide, Prisacom, Reed Elsevier, Save Mart Supermarkets, and California’s Department of Fish and Game.

Microsoft announced in November 2006 that it would distribute 70,000 Linux support certificates a year for five years, at the cost of $240m as part of an interoperability and patent deal with Novell.

In March, Novell announced that more than 40,000 certificates for three-year priority support subscriptions to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server have been activated under the collaboration agreement.

The companies are also working together on interoperability efforts around virtualization of Linux on Windows, and vice versa, the integration of Active Directory and Novell eDirectory, and the integration between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft’s Open XML formats.

The agreement between Novell and Microsoft has proved controversial despite its focus on improving interoperability between Windows and Linux.

It involved an agreement between the two parties not to sue each other’s customers for patent infringement, which led to claims from Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer that Linux contains Microsoft’s intellectual property, and from open source supporters that the deal infringed the GNU General Public License used for Linux.

Ultimately, Novell and Microsoft announced that they had agreed to disagree over the issue of patent infringement, while the patent covenant was deemed by the Free Software Foundation to be compliant with the terms of the GPL, if not its spirit.

The FSF is determined to prevent a repeat of the deal, however, and with the delivery in March of draft 3 of the forthcoming GPLv3 maintained that the deal had been rendered harmless with terms that prevented a repeat.

The patent agreement was determined to be outside the scope of the GPL as it was a covenant not to sue each other’s customers rather than a patent license between the two companies.