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Sometimes Microsoft and Novell are the best of pals, and sometimes they’re not as was demonstrated today when a US Federal appeals court let 2 of 6 claims in Novell’s antitrust suit against Microsoft continue to trial. These particular antitrust claims are related to Novell’s allegation that “Microsoft used its monopoly power to limit sales of WordPerfect, a word-processing program, and Quattro Pro, a spreadsheet program.”
Microsoft and Novell today announced the opening of an interoperability lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts that had been promised in their collaboration agreement of last November.
A week without some news about Microsoft and its document standards battles would be like a week without rain. Based on the number of items this week, it must be rather soggy outside.
Last Friday the Free Software Foundation released the GNU General Public License, version 3 and there have been a variety of reactions, not all enthusiastic. Since one of the avowed targets of GPL v3 was Microsoft’s recent patent deals with Linux distributors (e.g. with Novell and with Xandros), there was great anticipation for what Microsoft’s reaction would be to the final version. That reaction was announced yesterday and is basically the claim that GPL v3 does not apply and a disclaimer to make sure it never applies:
Microsoft added a third Linux distributor to its open source patent protection program today when they and Linspire announced a licensing and technical collaboration agreement. There are some novel aspects to the agreement, compared with the prior ones with Novell and Xandros, which reflect Linspire’s business model of shipping the Debian (soon Ubuntu) Linux distribution with proprietary add-ons that make it more acceptable for consumer desktop use.
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