I was reading Dave Rosenberg's commentary on Novell's patent deal with Microsoft and got to thinking about how much "protection" there actually is in the relationship. Novell has been selling this protection hard to its Suse prospects ("Linux is scary because Microsoft might sue. But we have a deal with Microsoft..."). Extortion? Sure. But for some it seems that integrity has a price.

For those who can't be bought, just how much protection are you missing? Not very much, it seems to me, and to a range of open-source legal experts I e-mailed to solicit their opinions.

I asked them to weigh in on the matter. Here's what I heard.

Given that Linux is Linux is Linux, in many ways (a phrase I first heard Ian Murdock of Debian fame use back in 2002), I initially thought that a suit against Ubuntu/Canonical, for example, would be tantamount to a suit against Suse. But it's not, as Microsoft would not be legally bound to do the coherent thing, which would be to sue every Linux distributor that was alleged to violate its patents.

More Here