Red Hat is addressing the use of Microvell's coupons, so-called 'protection money', and even their lack of communication on the matter.

"I think that there has been a strong amount of external communication by Microsoft and Novell on this topic," he [Red Hat CEO] said. "We certainly expect that there will be those cases where customers will consume those coupons. We're certainly encouraging one or two customers to consume all of them, let's get this over with."

As Jeremy Allison told us, the patents-related part of this deal was deliberately snuck in around the 90^th minute.

My guess is that the negotiations for the useful parts of the agreement (the virtualization part and the federated directory interoperability part) had, as Ron says, been going on for months and just before Novell wanted to seal the deal Microsoft turned up with "there's just this one more thing we want you to sign..." and in desperation to get the other parts of the deal done they rushed it through.

It is rather obvious that Novell was fooled. It swallowed the bait, which was shrewdly prepared by Microsoft lawyers. To err is human, but why didn't Novell walk out of the deal? Ron Hovsepian response was too little, too late.