Just hours ago, LinuxWatch talked about the similarities between the invisible weapon used against Novell and the invisible weapon used against Xandros.

Once more we have Microsoft pledging that it won't sue Novell -- excuse me, Xandros -- Linux customers for violating its IP, specifically patents. What patents? Determined how? Violated in what way? We don't know, and Microsoft still isn't telling.

It has become very clear that invisibility and deceit have become a way of overcharging companies. In order to defend that weapon, one needs to just stay out of court.

The problem with this whole can of worms is that Microsoft is gambling on never going to court.

So, as Shane puts is, what are we waiting for? Microsoft should be forced to reveal its cards one way or another. On the other hand, the 'cold war' is apparently ineffective and, according to this mini interview from InformationWeek, no 'nuclear winter' is expected. Fortunately, in that same item, it is also argued that the attitude towards Free software remains unaffected. High-level figures are apparently not buying Microsoft's arguments. Only greedy/selfish Linux vendors do.

Johnson also says he has no special insight into what Microsoft is up to, but he doesn't think it matters all that much. It won't change attitudes toward open source adoption.

"Customers have long since decided open source is safe to use. In our space, it is hard to find any enterprise customer that does not use a lot of open source," he noted. Leading closed source products from IBM, BEA and Oracle use Apache, Samba and other open source internally, he added.