Yesterday as well as the day before that, some of the press reopened a jar of worms and spoke about Microsoft’s software patents minefield, but bloggers did not pay any attention to Novell’s fight against the free in “Free software”. Novell is just about as guilty as Microsoft because without its participation and pasive endorsement Microsoft’s efforts would hold no water.

Jeff Jaffe's broken link (still available in the CTO blog) shows fanaticism for software patents at Novell; Microsoft's cash infusion for Novell is running out

Not just Mono but OOXML too is being used by Novell to promote and to spread Microsoft formats with software patents

Novell gets granted a software patents; Microsoft's new acquisition is hit.

Supine, weak, miserable Novell is doing the only things it still knows how to do, namely assisting Microsoft and amassing controversial patents on computer algorithms

There is no substantial news here other than development of discussions, which seem to spread fairly fast from one blog to another blog and soon onto the press. To repeat criticisms from yesterday about Novell’s announcement on China [1, 2], Novell and Microsoft keep spreading software patents to all parts of the world (never mind the legality), using SUSE Linux (Ballnux).

Further analysis of what Novell's likely sale means when it comes to its patents and what it is currently doing to MeeGo, to which it added a Mono stack

In hindsight, it is claimed that Red Hat too has an ambivalent view on the subject of software patents, at least historically; Novell, as expected, is not against software patents

WE HAVE BEEN AWARE for a couple of years now that Red Hat too was discussing patents with Microsoft but no deal was ever signed other than the recent virtualisation collaboration. It involves no patents at all. This issue is entirely off the table, so what came to fruition is inherently different.