Open Source Blog

I asked Matthew O’Neill, group head of distributed systems for HSBC global IT operations, whether he was ever worried about either Microsoft or Novell suing it for using the other company’s products.

Before O’Neill could answer, however, Susan Hauser, general manager of strategic partnerships and licensing at Microsoft, chipped in to answer for him, giving the stock answer that the companies’ customers had concerns about intellectual property and wanted peace of mind.

Well here I was asking the companies’ customer to explain his concerns about intellectual property and he wasn’t being given a chance to speak. Eventually he did make his feelings known, but it would seem HSBC isn’t as concerned about IP infringement as Microsoft.

“It’s a nice to have. I don’t think it was a main feature for me, but it’s nice to have,” he said, adding that it was good not to have to worry about any potential intellectual property infringements.

Not that it sounded like he was that worried about it in the first place – HSBC was already a user of Linux for business critical applications before the Novell/Microsoft deal, and it had already decided to standardize on SUSE Linux Enterprise server.

O’Neill pointed out that HSBC takes its legal requirements very seriously, which is of course true of any business, but does not mean that all legal requirements are considered equally.

“It’s definitely something we consider, but it’s not something that keeps us awake at night,” he added.

The Novell/Microsoft deal clearly has interoperability benefits for customers, as HSBC’s O’Neill also explained, but an explanation of the value of the patent deal still eludes me.

*If you’re a Novell customer, the deal gives you peace of mind that Microsoft won’t sue you, which it wasn’t going to do anyway, for code that may or may not be in Linux, that may or may not infringe Microsoft patents. If you’re a Microsoft customer, the deal gives you peace of mind that Novell won’t sue you, which it wasn’t going to do anyway, for code that may or may not be in Windows, that may or may not infringe Novell patents. No problem, you might think, except that it also provides the opportunity for an awful lot of FUD.