You criticize Novell, yet your site promotes it, indeed, money talks, huh? bunch of hipocrites. Why couldn’t you be like all the other honest jerks out there?

Here is one proof of this (from Justin Steinman):

“As you know, engineers at Novell and Microsoft are hard at work on our technical collaboration, and we demonstrated the first results at BrainShare in March. But in order to deliver the interoperability between Novell eDirectory and Microsoft Active Directory, as well as the bidirectional virtualization between Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise, Novell required sanctioned access to Microsoft’s code in order to develop open source interoperability without violating Microsoft’s intellectual property. “The Novell-Microsoft agreement is about bridging the worlds of open source and proprietary software, and in order to build this bridge, we’ve had to do several unique things, including signing an intellectual property agreement that would let Novell’s engineers get a look at some of Microsoft’s proprietary code. We’ve also done several other unique things like having Microsoft representatives sell certificates for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscriptions to their customers. I’d submit that all of these things are good for the adoption and growth of Linux.

When the issue was pointed out, SCO’s claims came to mind (IBM employees).

@MattD: the next sentence said that Novell was a willing victim. That was the reason Jeremy could not forgive them. A friend of mine used an analogy the other day, saying that Novell should cooperate with Microsoft like a woman should cooperate with a rapist.

@ vexorian@gmail: oopsie! I swear it was accidental. Freudian slip indeed. Fixed now.

If I remember correctly (as reported here), Novell had many days to consider this and review with their team of attorneys and many close within their loop – so “last minute” is a bit of a misnomer. I wasn’t like there was a timer on counting down to zero-hour. Novell took as much time as they needed to make this decision. They made the decision quickly.

I don’t think you can sign a legally-binding patent agreement and make a $40 million payment regarding this specific issue and then go back and verbally backtrack to gain community support via FUD – which is exactly what they did.

Also, so what? Novell employees look at Novell proprietary code (at whitebox and blackbox levels). Is your assertion here designed to say that any OSS effort that Novell specifically engages will pollute the OSS code out there? Surely the same could be said of any mixed source vendors – Sun, IBM etc who look at their own internal-only code and then throw out some OSS code to the masses)