It is very easy to let these things escape our attention, but every now and then, Novell selfishly lifts itself above rivals by boasting superiority on purely-litigious grounds. Here is one such case from yesterday's news.

On Friday, the first race in the Race to Linux 2.0 began. The goal is to get an application developed with Visual Studio for ASP.NET 2.0 ported to Linux.

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Now that Mono does not have to fear lawsuits from Microsoft, it can overcome the barriers that lawyers set up and programmers fear in many market segments.

If you look carefully at the wording, this actually comes from Novell, which supposedly 'protected' itself from lawsuits. How can Miguel de Icaza, who persistently (even in our Web site) insists that Mono carries no legal burden, actually defend this? Once again, Novell tries to brag about some sort of legal 'purity', thereby smearing the reputation of the code in general and casting an ugly shadow on other Linux distributors. Can you blame Red hat for rejecting Mono?

Moving on, LinuxWorld has an article that gives a disappointingly one-sided coverage. It mentions nothing but interoperability and ignores the community's opposition, not to mention that other 'feature' of that great deal. Conversely, ECT has an article which echoes Perens' words and suggests that Novell could one day become a Microsoft subsidiary.

Only a handful of reporters attended the briefing across the street from BrainShare where software developer Bruce Perens criticized Novell's relationship with Microsoft. He said the results of the partnership could doom Novell to becoming a Microsoft subsidiary because Novell does not write its own software but gets it instead from small independents.

These arguably far-fetched predictions seem to repeat themselves, despite the consistent denial.