Novell's press release on partnership with Microsoft

Novell's press release on partnership with Microsoft

I just saw the video press conference.

What makes me nervous is the fact that they always stress out, which is:

They pledge not to sue individual, non-commercial developers.

This reeks and sounds fishy. Many kernel developers are employed to do kernel work - Linus, Morton, and others.

I contribute code as well, albeit for hobby distros like alinux or pnutproject. Making that statement is like telling the kernel developers you are liable for patent infringement (although in my country, software cannot be patented by law).

Besides that, doing such a limiting patent protection violates a section of the GPL which is:

We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.

Wouldn't that constitute the revoking of the linux license for Novell? Although at first glance it seems they are talking about virtualization, looking closer they seem to emphasize the fact that they are the only "linux" company that provides patent protection.

I'm a bit shaken about this. It doesn't speak well for Novell in the long run. At least RedHat/Fedora didn't go that far (although I understand how people got pissed off with the Fedora split at first) and avoided as much as possible patent issues.

Clint