The Microsoft/Novell deal continues to elicit a great deal of discussion within the open source community, with some calling for a boycott of Novell products and services. While I find the agreement a tad concerning, I think the jury is still out as to what ultimately is going to become of this. In fact, one must wonder whether this will prompt Microsoft-oriented developers and consultants to begin exploring Linux on the basis their current and future clients may ask them to help out with integration and deployment projects.

At any rate, Novell and its community is hard at work trying to quell the fears of the general open source public. Recently, the OpenSUSE team recently held an IRC session to answer questions regarding the ramifications of this agreement. It makes for very interesting reading, you can find a complete transcript here.

I found this part of the chat particularly intriguing:

Nov 27 11:21:05 We’re paying for the promise that Microsoft made to our customers not to sue them
Nov 27 11:21:43 Not to sue them for what? For problems you don’t acknowledge exist?
Nov 27 11:21:57 Well, we put together an agreement with MS to make Linux and Windows work better together
Nov 27 11:22:03 *zippy (n=zero@xdslg239.osnanet.de) has joined #opensuse-project
Nov 27 11:22:05 Now, as everyone knows, MS has spent the last 10 years saying negative things about Linux
Nov 27 11:22:11 including implying that there are IP issues in Linux
Nov 27 11:22:30 It didn’t make sense for us to do a partnersihp with MS on interoperability issues and still have this patent cloud hanging around for our customers
Nov 27 11:22:36 *lmb (i=lmb@1.0.0.127.in-addr.de) has joined #opensuse-project
Nov 27 11:22:39 and so MS asked us to put together a patent agreement as well.
Nov 27 11:23:00 And so, we promise MS’s customers that we won’t sue them and they promise the same thing to our customres
Nov 27 11:23:08 They pay us for our promise and we pay them for their promise
Nov 27 11:23:24 It doesn’t matter if the allegations from MSFT are true or not

I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but if Novell and its customers are now protected from future lawsuits over patent violations, what does the future hold for other Linux-minded companies such as Red Hat?

Read the IRC log