This news is a day or two old, but I thought given the size of it, I should display it purely for the sake of history. Novell (The people who brought you SUSE Linux) and Microsoft have become partners. This surely signals the end for Novell, no other company has survived the 800lb gorillas embrace before. Remember Embrace, absorb, extinguish. Sad as Novells inevitable death will be, what is currently more serious is the affect it has on Linux. Novell have in effect admitted that they have infringed some of MS's patents, and through their partnership they are now offering indemnification from said patents. It is worth noting though that MS do not seem to have specified which patents. Quite similar to SCO and their copyright claims. So effectively Novell customers will be protected against legal action for their use of SUSE. However as the patents have not been specified, they cannot really guarantee protection. Furthermore whenever Novell sell a copy of SUSE saying you are protected against MS's patents, it implies that you need to be in order to use Linux. It's simply not true, MS seem very cagey about saying exactly which patents have been infringed, that is either because there are in fact none, or because they are worried the community will pull the infringing software out from the distros. Mono is a cause of concern for many, but that aside there is very little in Linux.

Novell may also have shot themselves in the foot as they have licensed patents for use, but only for SUSE customers, and the GPL pre-amble clearly states that patents must be licensed for all to use, or not licensed at all. It may well be that this union between MS and Novell will stop Novell from distributing GPL code. Certainly they are not likely to get too many customers from the Open Source Community in the future.

Red Hats response was "Unthinkable", for their full response go here

Posted by Shifty_Ben