Open Source Weblog

The event occurred in early March and was attended by 100 or so senior executives from open source vendors and users. The organizers have just released an executive summary of the event, including details of a Q&A with Sam Ramji, director of open source technical strategy at Microsoft, and Justin Steinman, director of marketing for Linux and open platforms at Novell.

According to the executive summary (PDF) “The cross-licensing agreement that Novell signed with Microsoft, according to both Justin and Sam, was necessary as Novell required sanctioned access to Microsoft’s code in order to develop open source interoperability without violating MSFT's IP.”

[There is a video of the presentation incidentally although it appears to cut off precisely as Sam Ramji is about to discuss that precise issue at 16.34, which is something of a shame, to say the least.]

UPDATE - Steinman has responded to a request for comment by confirming the explanation, although his response throws up more questions than it does answers. - UPDATE

Assuming the summary is accurate, therefore, the explanation certainly makes the deal more understandable, especially when you consider that a traditional patent licensing deal was not possible due to the nature of the GPL, but it does not explain why the companies have been so reticent about presenting this explanation before.

It’s not as if the two companies haven’t had the opportunity to present it before. It wasn’t mentioned in the original announcement, it wasn’t mentioned in Novell’s FAQ, it wasn’t mentioned in Microsoft’s FAQ, it wasn’t mentioned in Novell’s further details announcement, nor its open letter to the community.

[Most of these links can be found here, incidentally at a joint Microsoft/Novell page I’ve not seen before. It also has the incomplete video of Sam and Justin’s Q&A.]

It also wasn’t mentioned by Novell’s VP of worldwide sales and president of EMEA, Tom Francese, when I met with him in November, although one thing he did mention is that the full details of the deal would eventually find there way in to the public via the SEC.

“Given that there is no IP infringement, and no IP licenses have changed hands, it begs the questions: what exactly did Microsoft pay Novell $108m for and what exactly is Novell paying Microsoft at least $40m for?

‘The SEC will ask us to file all the details, and when you see that you'll see everything. Those details will be forthcoming,’ he said, declining to elaborate.”

Novell’s filings with the SEC have recently been delayed due to its internal accounting investigation, but now that is coming to a close it appears we shouldn’t have to wait too long to get all the details.

In the meantime, here’s an entertaining comment from Sam Ramji from the above mentioned video on Steve Ballmer’s comments about Linux containing Microsoft’s IP [with apologies for the bad sound quality]:

“Steve is a force of nature… He made some really counterproductive comments in November, which we’re still suffering through the consequences of. He’s [inaudible] clear that those were counterproductive comments that didn’t really [inaudible] what we’re trying to do here.”