MEMORIES RETURN of the possibility that Novell signed its patent deal with Microsoft because it was going out of business. This is still an area worthy of exploration.

But anyway, Novell is about to suffer from great turbulence across Europe and Novell's McCarry, whom we mentioned previously in [1, 2, 3], has already tried to deny this. He is heading Novell's UK operations, but we hear that Novell UK is a mess right now and we garnered evidence too.

ZDNet UK has just published an interview with McCarry. In this interview, for a change, he is asked some decent questions that really dig deep. For example:

Has the agreement [with Microsoft] affected Novell's standing in the open-source community?

Novell is one of the largest contributors to the open-source community and we do take the community very seriously. We have a Microsoft [press] statement we can send you about that, that might help.

Novell agreed to pay Microsoft licensing fees on the understanding Microsoft would not assert patents it holds that supposedly cover Linux. These patents have never been tested in court and have never been publicly specified by Microsoft. Did Novell make too big a concession to Microsoft in submitting to its patent claims?

I think the intellectual-property conversation is really complex, but I'm not the right person to talk to about this [at Novell]. One aspect of the agreement was protection for Novell customers.

In other words, he is unable to come up with reasonable explanations of his own, so he's weaseling out instead and referring to other people's words.

If Novell's own managers are unable to justify a patent deal that harmed GNU/Linux, who can? ⬆