Novell is at the crossroads. And I don’t mean that as a metaphor for some large decision or deciding which future direction to take. No, I mean it more in the Robert Johnson “I went down to the crossroads” kind of way. Novell just inked a deal with the devil, and I think they’ve grossly miscalculated.
The deal, from what I can tell, centers around some sort of ‘patent protection’ mumbo jumbo (a voodoo term for promises to the devil) and talks at length about commercial customers and legal stuff around jointly developed code. Gah. They’ve already lost me. I thought this was going to be something cool about how MS will play nice with Mono or that MS is going to open up some of their filesharing stuff under the GPL or some other Technological New Thing ™.
Nope. This is all about the suits. This is about that disaster we have for a patent office. This is about the Devil’s own children– the lawyers.
Two things don’t seem to have crossed the minds of our friends in Orem:
1. The community is scared shitless over this, and will avoid SuSE like the plague (go Ubuntu go!)
2. Novell’s own developers are probably printing their resumes as discretely and quickly as possible.
If I were at Red Hat, I would send the open memo to HR to publish an open call “We’ll hire all SuSE and Linux-related Novell employees immediately”.
The whole deal seems to depend on the idea the Novell will continue to publish linuxy goodness under the GPL but at the same time put some sort of induced protection (aka veiled threat) that they won’t sue my ass when MS comes a callin’ for my soul. Well, that shit ain’t gonna work if Novell doesn’t have any developers anymore.
Marc, Joachim, and all you other SuSE friends of mine– get out of there. I can hear the Old Man laughing already.
I promise I'm relevant 
Well, sure enough things are starting to play out against Novell– slashdotters are completely hating on them, other blogs are starting their exodus. Way to go Novell– you blew it.