Ballmer Confirms Novell Deal is About Patents

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2007-02-17 14:02:19 UTC
Modified: 2007-02-19 09:25:57 UTC

Head over to Mary Jo Foley's blog.

The same week that Microsoft issued a press release providing further details about some of the technological advances that will result from the November 2006 technology agreement between Novell and Microsoft, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told Wall Street what he really thinks the deal means to Microsoft.

During a forecast update meeting for financial analysts and shareholders on February 15, Ballmer reiterated that, to him, the deal is more about Microsoft exerting intellectual property (IP) pressure on Novell than anything else.

This confirms that Microsoft's plans were maolovalent all along.

Comments

Sslaxx

2007-02-19 13:39:28

And the sky is blue. This is news somehow?
Roy Schestowitz

2007-02-19 17:44:04

As it says above, "This confirms that...". We have been saying this for months, but it's nicer to hear it from Microsoft's own mouths. Steve Ballmer has just said that the deal is largely about patents. Ron Hovsepian's defence arguments are too little, too late. When Microsoft and Novell first negotiated, only interoperability was in stake. Then, Microsoft added a weasel phrase and paid Novell $0.3 to accept an inconvenient truth. Microsoft would say that patents were exchanged in both directions, but the truth is that Novell got paid a large sum for admission of guilt, supposedly on behalf of all GNU/Linux distributors and/or users.

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