I'm sure you've heard by now, but if you haven't, you can read Groklaw's take on the fact that Novell and Microsoft have entered a patent agreement. I think some other interesting reading on this is Miguel de Icaza's blog. I actually expected him to be one of the people driving this, but apparently he didn't know until it was almost finished.

I think that the one thing that many open source people are missing in this deal is a subtlety of the wording. Novell is not "licensing patents from Microsoft" it is entering an agreement so that Microsoft will not sue their customers for any possible patent infringement. There is a huge difference here. I think that the case Novell is worried about the most is when they go and sell to a customer and the customer comes back with: "Oh, you're just going to get sued by Microsoft and so we might as well buy their product now instead of later." This agreement says to those customers that it's safe to buy Novell Linux until 2012. What this doesn't say is that it was unsafe before, just that it is safe now.

I understand that many people are approaching this with the logic of: "Why would they do this unless they knew they were violating a Microsoft patent?" That's a fair argument. But, I think that Novell, and Linux in general as the smaller player in the IT sector has to remove barriers to adoption. One of those barriers is a perceived legal risk. Whether it is there or not, it is perceived to be there, which slows down adoption. I believe that Novell's motivation for this agreement is more about removing perceived risk rather than actual risk.

Maybe I'm just an optimist. Maybe I'm not jaded enough about the "evil empire" that is Microsoft. But, I do know there are some really good Free Software people at Novell. If they start jumping ship, then I'll get worried.


posted Nov 8, 2006 | permanent link