Will Novell use all these millions to defend user freedoms by working to de-legalize software patents in the countries it operates in?

My question: Is there any way to create a path for Suse users and developers to communicate code fixes and/or bug reports to the Suse engineers without entering into such a covenant?

• Microsoft is therefore paying nearly $700 per "coupon", approximately double the cost of a one-year basic SLES subscription.
• On page 23 of Novell's most recent quarterly report filed with the SEC they reveal that their "Open Enterprise Server" produced revenues of less than $90 million in the previous six months. This means that Microsoft has paid Novell two and a half years worth of SLES revenues. This seems both very optimistic and very generous on Microsoft's part.
• Microsoft will spend $12 million annually plus $34 million over five years to market SLES/Windows virtualization. This is $19 million annually. On page 5 of the Novell quarterly report it shows that Novell had nearly $190 million of sales and marketing expenses in six month, or $380 million annually. Again, it seems very optimistic that Microsoft will be able to resell so much SLES with so little budget, unless they plan to distribute SLES at a heavy discount.

My question: The high price paid to Novell does not look like a wise investment on Microsoft's part. Does anyone know if there is some unpublicized aspect of the deal that makes it more advantageous to Microsoft?

Does anyone know the details of how this will work, especially with respect to virtualization? Will Novell be sponsoring a collaboration between Microsoft engineers and the Xen team whereby the MS engineers help optimize Xen for a Vista guest? Will Novell engineers be assisting Microsoft in virtualizing Suse Linux on a Vista platform? I can understand why Novell could use interoperability assistance from Microsoft due to fact that Vista is closed-source, but why would Microsoft need such assistance from Novell when all code and documentation of the Suse Linux operating system is available to the public?

My question: This offer to collaborate technically with Novell does not look like good business on Microsoft's part. Can anyone explain what Microsoft gets out of this collaboration?

My question: How deeply and securely can one "interoperate" with a set of technologies whose source code is kept secret?

The reason given in the Microsoft FAQ for Microsoft's higher payment is "(the) net balancing payment from Microsoft to Novell reflecting the larger applicable volume of Microsoft’s product shipments". This does not make sense in terms of how patent litigation works. One company does not sue ALL the users of anothers products for patent violations. Rather they target one or two companies that have "deep pockets", as Daimler Chrysler was targeted by SCO. Thus each of the customers of a huge company is actually statistically safer from litigation than each of the customers of a smaller company. This method of calculating patent protection payment does not make sense.

A second reason for Microsoft's higher payment was given by Ron Hovsepian in his Open Letter to the Community of 20 November in which he says: "Novell has a significant patent portfolio, and in reflection of this fact, the agreement we signed shows the overwhelming balance of payments being from Microsoft to Novell." This also makes little sense, given that Microsoft holds 5834 US patents, compared to Novell's 279. Some argue that Novell's patents tend to be "stronger", i.e. more likely to hold water in court due to true originality of ideas. Nonetheless, Microsoft's ability to threaten litigation is much, much stronger. This second reason for a net payment from Microsoft to Novell makes no sense either.

My question: The high price paid to Novell does not look like a wise investment on Microsoft's part. Does anyone know if there is some unpublicized aspect of the deal that makes it more advantageous to Microsoft?

http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/faq_opensource.html says: "We maintain that Mono does not infringe any Microsoft patents." Does that mean that MS maintain that Mono does infringe Microsoft patents and they said that explicitly setting up agreement with Novell so that's the reason why you didn't put in FAQ this statement: "Mono does not infringe any Microsoft patents."

1) Do Novell believe that MS infringes Novell's patents? This is suggested by Simon Phipps, and actually by MS too

Phipps: "... word on the street is that Novell had some deep patent dirt on Microsoft..."

MS: "Microsoft and Novell have agreed to disagree on whether (..) certain Microsoft offerings infringe Novell patents."

2) If the public financial details are correct. MS will pay $240 million for 5x70.000 SLE coupons. According to my calculations that's about $685 per coupon. I understand that a coupon is a one year subscription. That's a pretty steep price, makes people, including me, think MS might be buying something other than coupons for the money. Maybe there's some relation to question #1, otherwise I don't like to think about what MS is buying.

Posted Nov 21, 2006 9:16 UTC (Tue) by subscriber dwalters [Link]

If the IRC meeting is meant to provide some clarity about the Novell-Microsoft deal, it needs to answer some hard questions from the FLOSS community. Here are three questions I would like answered (and no weasel-words please, just straight answers):

Q1. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stated last week that Linux "uses [Microsoft's] patented intellectual property". Does Novell share this view? If so, exactly which parts of Linux are considered to be affected by Microsoft patents? If you disagree, do you know which parts of Linux Microsoft considers to be affected by their patents?

Q2. What does Novell have to say to the large constituency in the FLOSS community who regard the patent agreement between Novell and Microsoft to be in discordance with the spirit and intent of the GPL V2, even if not with the letter (i.e. it gets through a loophole). In other words, does Novell agree that when it distributes the GPL'd software in SLED/SLES to customer A, that customer is not liable for patent infringement of any Microsoft patents, but when customer A then distributes the GPL'd software in SLED/SLES to person B, person B is potentially liable for Microsoft-patent infringement?

Q3. It seems almost certain that the loophole which may make the Novell/MS patent deal permissible under GPL 2 will be closed in version 3. When new versions of great swathes of software components vital to all GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. compilers, tools, the C library, and many other components) are licensed under GPL 3 in 2007, what will Novell's response be?

The last one is the most important question that needs answered in my view, because until I get a satisfactory answer to that question, there's no way I can recommend Novell's Linux to any enterprise customers in good conscience. As it stands, it seems to me that there's too much of a risk that future versions of SLES/SLED (which will include components licensed under GPL 3) might become undistributable if the Novell-Microsoft agreement still stands.

Well i'm getting a little confused here. If you think of it you could come to the conclusion, that the open source concept is nothing but a very clever way to take advantage of developement and creativity without having to pay for it? Mayor companies today place parts of their patent stock at the open source comunitys disposal in order to get their own products enriched for free! Open Source is likely to save them millions and millions and on top of that all the developers are highly motyvated. It iscommonly known that it is quite difficult and very expensive too to get people to work with such dynamic power if they are in salaried employment.

Why do i think so? Well all the efforts and the hype created about this thing surely doesn't come out of nowhere. There are many many topics nowadays that are of mayor interest to millions of people but none of them gets quite such an attention. So...obviously open source is ment to become pupular. But this fact has quite certainly nothing to do with the undesputedly positive basic idea of open sorce development.

The terms of the individual, non-commercial developer patent non-assert are on www.microsoft.com/interop. You are covered if you are doing non-commercial open source software development. This includes individual enthusiasts, such as a student or a developer who does work on his own time on a project of personal interest to him. If you are compensated for your development, then your activities are considered "commercial", and you would not be covered.

My question: What do you mean by 'compensated for development'? That sounds like sponsorship to go to GUADEC or another meeting is covered, or any other help you get from the community. Are you trying to say that only people employed working as a contractor for companies are "commercial", or that anyone compensated in any way for developing is "commercial"? And which page are the terms of the non-assert on?

Also, one more question regarding Mono. Miguel de Icaza has said that the patent protection agreement is important for Mono, apparently because it ensures that individual Mono developers/users can't get sued. But given this, what is the incentive for other commercial Linux vendors (such as Red Hat and Ubuntu) to distribute Mono, if they risk getting sued by Microsoft (because they are not part of the patent protection agreement)?