Microsoft's shady deals with Xandros and Novell
By making "intellectual property" deals with commercially oriented distributors of Linux, Microsoft isn't alienating anybody it hasn't turned off already.
So far, the two companies that have inked such deals -- Xandros and Novell -- are focused on selling server operating systems to large businesses. And while they may have community involvement, they're not community-oriented, like the Debian distro from which Xandros is derived, or even the wildly popular Ubuntu (itself a Debian derivative).
So Microsoft is sticking with business-centric companies for these deals, and I suspect the corporate customers of Xandros and Novell will, for the most part, applaud anything that keeps them from being harassed by Microsoft. And that legal pledge of non-harassment now becomes a marketing peg that Novell and Xandros can use to sell more server software. It's dirty business, it alienates the very people who are most passionate about your products, but it just might work for those involved.
Also:
Here's their press release and here's the paragraph about the patent sellout:
Intellectual property assurance. Through the agreement, Microsoft will make available patent covenants for Xandros customers. These covenants will provide customers with confidence that the Xandros technologies they use and deploy in their environments are compliant with Microsoft's intellectual property. By putting a framework in place to share intellectual property, Xandros and Microsoft can speed the development of interoperable solutions.
So it's not exactly what Novell agreed to, then, from the sound of it, not to me anyway. Patent covenants isn't the same wording as a patent peace agreement. So this must be an attempt to work around the GPLv3, I think.
And look at this phrase from the marketing deal:
Xandros Deal Isn't Identical to Novell's: Picking One's Way Around the GPL?
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