03.21.07
Ron’s Tiny Regret
Apparently, Ron Hovsepian does indeed regret the IP covenant aspect of the Microvell deal, and he confirms that it was Microsoft that brought that aspect of the agreement to the table in the first place.
In an interesting bit of spinning, Hovsepian describes the IP covenant as "secondary or tertiary in the discussions and it took a little bit of time for that to come out in those discussions". That really seems like a nice way of confirming Jeremy Allison’s suspicion that the IP covenant was a requirement sprung upon Novell in the latter stages of negotiations.
Anyhow, Hovsepian’s regret is that his Open Letter would have been "timelier", but I suppose it took a while for Microsoft PR to finish editing it and preparing their response, huh?