Shortly after the infamous deal had been made, I happened to have spotted an article about Sun's deal with Microsoft. It goes back to 2004.

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday said that it is looking for ways to work more closely with developers of the Open Office open source project, while at the same time, apparently reserving the right to sue them, according to a legal agreement between Microsoft and Open Office's major sponsor, Sun Microsystems Inc., made public this week.

PJ has just posted the following analysis. It compares Novell's deal with Sun Microsystems' deal.

What do I think Microsoft is doing with these deals? I suspect they are making deals with every entity that has patents, clearing the deck so it can attack Red Hat and the entire Open Source method of development. Whatever is left standing will be firmly inside Microsoft's embrace, and you know as well as I do what that historically means.

The way this is bound to develop will be interesting for many reason. Among those reasons we have OpenOffice, which is fundamentally the main link between the two deals. While the OpenOffice team approves and supports the deal, Novell can be scrutinised over that very same legal timebomb.