MSFT cannot acquire NOVL simply by definition pursuant to US/EU (Sherman, Clayton…) Antitrust/Unfair Competition law.

Yes, I am aware of this and I discussed this elsewhere. There are all sorts of things Microsoft can do, however, including manipulation by proxy (SCO-Ransom Love, Microsoft selling SUSE coupons, et cetera). Also see the following:

http://boycottnovell.com/2007/05/16/sun-microsoft-speculation/

/s/chaosUnplugged

Thanks,

chaosUnplugged

This thread seems to me to miss a central point. It is, when the
lion cuddles up to the lamb, what is the lion up to? Does he know
something we don’t? *How come* Microsoft connected to Novell
and then Novell comes up with these Unix rights? When things
happen close in time, maybe they connect somehow. Did the
Novell and Microsoft people *know something* then? It was not
all that long ago. What was happening behind closed doors? In
private discussions on golf courses, etc? ??

I think we are seeing the start of a whole new story, and when
it grows up, who will profit? *Who will lose?*

Not so sure I’m happy about this — Martha Adams
[2007 Aug 12]

On the other hand, in Technocrat, I received the following reply:

Yes you are wrong. I would say there are 6 major Unixes or Unix-likes out there including Linux.

1 – All the BSD variants are already ok because of the ATT suit many years ago, where the house of cards of Unix copyrights was originally shown.
2 – Linux, aside from there being no copyrightable code from System V in it as far as anyone has shown (and they have looked, I think), has been and is still being distributed under the GPL by Novell to this very second, with willful knowlege, so it is only GPL encumbered no matter what from Novell.
3 – Solaris is out there with Sun having irrevocable contract.
4 – AIX (and the other IBM unixes) are out there with irrevocable IBM contract – both stipulated by Novell.
5 – Ditto HPux and such from HP with ATT contracts. Did HPUX originally come from Apollo? 5 – OSX is Mach and BSD based from NextStep and falls under #1.

There are other Unix variants (Irix, QNX, several tranaction tandem like ones, etc.) but almost all of them had contracts with ATT which would be still in force per the ruling yesterday (which said that there was no time limits on the contracts), or are so different to make them also separate like Linux.

Thus Novell would have to act like SCO did with probably same result to disrupt anything, and I don’t see any reason to do that.

While it’s hard to know what/who to believe, putting information out there and sharing it through transparency is the best way to unravel a plot, if one exists.

…well, IANAL, but when I read the Microsoft-Novell agreement, that is *not* what I got from it. The deal specifically says that ‘clone products’ are *not* under protection. I would assume that Microsoft see Mono as a ‘clone product’ of their official .NET runtime.

However, subsequent deals appear to be more clear, that is true.