I appreciate the response. I can’t help but feel that collaboration between the two sides changes the legal terrain /entirely/.

Wanna see “crazy-paranoid”? Check this one out:

http://openubuntu.blogspot.com/2006/11/novell-will-fork-any-open-source-app.html
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Novell_to_FORK_all_apps_that_move_to_GPLv3_Samba_tops_list

And right there I actually defended you guys. I have been advocating SuSE/SUSE for years, but Novell seems to have ditched SUSE (or Opensuse, the community), renamed it, and evolved to become something rather strange.

Why can’t you guys be more like Red Hat? See the latest news from the Fedora project.

Fedora to Become More Open and Independent of Red Hat

,—-[ Quote ]
| The most obvious change will probably be the omission of “Core” in
| the distribution name. That’s because the core packages are to be
| moved into the community infrastructure, so that they are open
| to contributions by external developers.
`—-

http://linux.about.com/b/a/257580.htm

Samba is trying to help you guys. Why won’t the management listen, admit it has made a mistake and reverse (to the extent possible)?

Another thing I fail to comprehend is why/how an executives can say the following:

,—-[ Quote ]
| Microsoft Corp is using scare tactics to exert pressure on PC vendors
| not to explore the potential of desktop Linux, according to Novell
| Inc president and COO, Ron Hovsepian
`—-

Several months later he exchanges smiles with one of the biggest business thugs of the past two decades. It’s almost as though he decided to join ‘the gang’ while punishing all others (including those who coded for him and supported his products) in the process. This leaves one speechless.

This is crazy-paranoid. Novell did not work with Microsoft on the features we contributed to OpenOffice.org.