We mentioned Centeris earlier , the context being the GPLv3, which was needed due to compatibility issues with Samba. One curious thing about Centeris shows up in this newer IDG article.

Open, which will be licensed under GPL and LGPL, will ship with the next versions of Red Hat and Ubuntu, according to company officials. A deal with Novell is in the works.

Will this deal resemble the Dell deal? Will this involve software patents and royalties by any chance? Sometimes, companies enter the patent liability mess by association, by liaising with a Microsoft partner rather than Microsoft directly. We saw that with Scalix. There's also the role of GPL proxies. It's a role that Novell in particular has been happy to fill. ⬆