Never turn your back on a wild animal

The devil is sending his minions to collect. A patent troll company is suing our good friends at Red Hat and Novell for technology to power multiple desktops (i.e. multiple screens of data through one monitor, with some hotkey switch between them).The funnytragic part here is that the suit is pretty traceable back to Redmond. A couple of MS lawyer-types joined this troll company not more than 4 months ago. When Novell signed a deal with the devil, I doubt they figured he would come collecting this soon. Novell will bear the brunt of this much more than Red Hat, in my opinion, for a number of reasons:

1. Novell is already perceived as ‘tainted’ by their previous licencing agreements, whereas Red Hat follows a much quieter path
2. Red Hat has better pipeline into the technical arguments that may be needed to defend this (think old-skool UNIX interfaces)
3. Red Hat has better cashflow

In the end, I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft ends up ‘coming to the rescue’ to side with Novell (and grudgingly Red Hat). Afterall, one of the major (the only one I’ve seen?) eye-candy bits to Vista is their multiple desktop window 3-d thingamajig (which is crude and stupid ompared to the beauty of Beryl).