I knew that Novell/Microsoft deal is going to be really bad for the open source community. The deal will protect Novell’s Linux customers from Microsoft’s patent lawsuits liability, which will open cases against other Linux distributions and vendors. It is shameful for Novell to take in this deal and disregards any aspect of the open source movement, and I personally do not believe that Microsoft will stay in the same bed as the OSS community. Steve Ballmer made it clear that he thinks Linux is an issue Microsoft needs to confront in term of intellectual properties violations. He stated clearly in his keynotes at PASS Con in Seattle that Microsoft is not in this deal to help Linux.

“We’ve had an issue, a problem that we’ve had to confront, which is because of the way the GPL works, and because open-source Linux does not come from a company — Linux comes from the community — the fact that that product uses our patented intellectual property is a problem for our shareholders. We spend $7 billion a year on R&D, our shareholders expect us to protect or license or get economic benefit from our patented innovations. So how do we somehow get the appropriate economic return for our patented innovation, and how do we do interoperability.”

Keep in mind even though Novell owns SuSe, OpenSuSe is still a community project and I don’t think it’s fair to penalize OpenSuSe developers for something they do NOT have any control over. OpenSuSe is one of the major distro around and I hope everyone in the community will still help this project grow. Samba’s developer have stated their position on this deal and feels that Novell is doing a great disservice to the open source community.

“For Novell to make this deal shows a profound disregard for the relationship that they have with the Free Software community.” The Samba project team also believes that “using patents as competitive tools in the free software world is not acceptable.”

It will take awhile for the OSS community to trust Novell again as an open source company. To many OSS community members, Novell is like a two headed snake at this moment.