Those, apparently, are some of Bruce Lowry's words in his response to some of the things that Matt Asay has had to say regarding the Microvell deal.

Third, you seem to suggest we're waving the IP flag to get customers to buy our stuff. This is just flat wrong. Our approach to this deal has been focused on interoperability. That's what the customers care the most about. As Ron has said before, Microsoft introduced the patent proposal. We felt that the overall package was important enough for customers that we worked with them to come up with the patent agreement. You seem to suggest we've been inconsistent on this issue. We haven't. We've said from the get-go that this was about interoperability for customers. Some may care about the patent issues. Others may not. What our agreement does is remove the issue from the table for them.

I am on record as being vehemently opposed to the patent covenant aspect of the deal, but much more importantly, the folks from whom Novell derive their profitable products from care very much about "the patent issues". As a matter of fact, they care so much that they are dilligently working on a new license version with verbiage to specifically address the loophole Novell exploited in GPLv2, with the intention of derailing their discriminatory deal with Microsoft.

Until Novell is capable of understanding these fundamental concepts about the Free Software community, they will remain a proprietary company that purchased some "open source" products to offset their legacy products continually mounting losses, and never be considered an "Open Source" company embraced and supported by the community.

In regards to Lowry's assertions that, to Novell, it's an interoperability deal, really, and the patent aspects are "just another level of protection for those customers who want it", this is inconsistent with Stafford Masie's statements at the CITI forum that their deal with Microsoft is indeed a competitive advantage for Novell, but not an exclusive one.

So, which is it Novell - is your patent covenant with Microsoft a competitive advantage or something that's just nice to have?