Microsoft and Novell have taken it into their collective head to push their peculiar axis into China – and elsewhere – to convert unsupported Linux users to SUSE.

They say they’ve had demand “to build a bridge between open source and proprietary software and provide interoperability and IP peace of mind,” a claim that set off guffaws across the open source community considering China’s reputation for ignoring IP rights – among other civil liberties – and the fact that it’s been a big-time Windows pirate.

Compliance, however, is increasingly identified with civilized co-existence and Novell says the Chinese care as much as anybody about interoperability.

Anyway, Microsoft is going to supply the People’s Insurance Company of China Group, the Dairy Farm Company and Dawning Information Industry, the Chinese server company, with certificates good for three years’ worth of SUSE support.

How many certificates all this works out to be and how much they’re worth is unclear but Dawning sells a lot of servers.

The pair says its collaboration in China, called an “incremental investment,” will focus on joint marketing and training in HPC (SLES and Windows Compute Cluster Server running in a dual boot configuration) and cross-platform virtualization (Microsoft’s promised Hyper-V and SUSE’s Xen technology).

Since cutting the deal in November of 2006, Novell has gotten upwards of a much needed $141 million from Microsoft for certificates.