I think that when the MS and Novell deal surfaced a few weeks ago, everyone was either shocked or surprised. Some people, like myself, looked at the bright side and some looked on the negative. I am starting to switch my opinion, the more i think about it. The problem is not really the fact that Novell made a deal for licenses with Microsoft. the problem is that they made a deal which gives Novel users a “get out of jail free” card in regards to patent issues. This is pretty neat in a sense but how could Novell make that decision without communicating with the community whos software they are selling. The main problem is not that they made a deal, they made a deal under which they used everone elses software and tagged it as SUSE, then used as their own and made deals with it. Even though all the components (with the exception of YaSt) are GPL’d and written by someone else.

Now the discussion has started to add clauses that dissallow this kind of behaviour with GPL v3 .  Here in this groklaw article you can read about that a little. Suffice to say, the community responed and is adjusting its license to protect what is theirs. I think this “deal” will have consequences that neither Microsoft nor Novell thought about before, what do you think?

//Flosse

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