Novell Gets $348 Million From Microsoft

An anonymous reader writes, "Novell has published additional details about its agreements with Microsoft concerning Windows and Linux interoperability and patents. It seems the company is receiving an up-front payment of $348 million from Microsoft, for SLES subscription certificates and for patent cross-licensing. Microsoft will make an upfront payment to Novell of $240 million for SLES subscription 'certificates' that Microsoft can use, resell, or distribute over the term of the agreement. Regarding the patent cooperation agreement, Microsoft will make an up-front net payment to Novell of $108 million, and Novell will make ongoing payments totaling at least $40 million over five years to Microsoft."

Comments

Novell defends it's move ...

[breem42]

From the same site (different page - http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS4685037869.html) :

"Under the patent cooperation agreement, Novell's customers receive directly from Microsoft a covenant not to sue. Novell does not receive a patent license or covenant not to sue from Microsoft, and we have not agreed with Microsoft to any condition that would contradict the conditions of the GPL. Our agreement does not affect the freedom that Novell or anyone else in the open source community, including developers, has under the GPL and does not impose any condition that would contradict the conditions of the GPL. Therefore, the agreement is fully compliant with the GPL,"

Re:NTFS support

[irgu]

NTFS-3G has full read-write, open source NTFS support for a few months: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ Fedora Extra, Debian, Ubuntu and many others have it already.

Re:I'm left to wonder if

[killjoe]

Yes. Novell is the new SCO.

If you really want to understand what's going on go read groklaw. The headline here is wrong. There is no patent cross licensing, that would violate the GPL. There is a promise which is not a license not to sue. It's a weird thing. There are also some unsaid, unprinted, nobody knows about exception.

So MS promises not to sue novell customers for MS patents with some exceptions. Most likely those exceptions involve some companies (for example google) or some technologies like XML.

MS has promised to sue other companies. Ballmer said that anybody who uses linux from anybody except novell is under a threat of a patent lawsuit from MS.