Reaction
Microsoft and Novell came under immediate attack. Lawyers involved with open-source licensing said that the agreement definitely violated the spirit and almost certainly the letter of section 7 of the GPL, and if it somehow slipped through some unintended loophole in GPLv2, that loophole would be plugged in GPLv3. Novell and Microsoft, feeling the pressure, admitted that the details of the agreement might need a little work. "Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza from Novell have been extremely clear with us that the existing covenant is not good enough," Microsoft Director of Shared Source Jason Matusow blogged, asking for input. Novell responded to the barrage of criticism with several FAQs and open letters. They made the text of the agreement available to Eben Moglun of the Software Freedom Law Center (www.softwarefreedom.org) so that he could evaluate it against the GPL. Novell's position was that there was no acknowledgement of any infringement and no indemnification of Novell, but only of its users, thus there was no violation of the GPL.
To say that this didn't square with Microsoft's interpretation of the deal would be an understatement. Ballmer was flatly asserting that Linux infringed Microsoft intellectual property and that the deal addressed this. "They've appropriately compensated Microsoft for our intellectual property," he said. Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian lashed back, "Since our announcement, some parties [guess who] have spoken about this patent agreement in a damaging way, and with a perspective that we do not share. We strongly challenge those statements."
Ballmer's claim clearly caught Novell off-guard and made them look foolish. It also suggests a couple of obvious questions: (1) What Linux code infringes Microsoft IP, and since infringement indemnification was symmetrical in the deal but most of the money flowed in Novell's direction, one assumes that most of the infringing is on Microsoft's part, so (2) what Microsoft code infringes Novell's IP?
Microsoft is silent on both questions.
Two questions that might be put to Novell are: (1) If there is no infringement, what are your customers being indemnified against, and (2) before this deal, you offered your customers "comprehensive protection" against "copyright infringement claims by third parties against registered Novell customers with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server," so what are you offering them now that you weren't offering them then?
(I think I know the answer to that last one, thanks to Novell CMO John Dragoon: It's protection against "imagined" threats.)
