
"Often cast as the peacemaker in free software disputes,
Bruce Perens is on the warpath. When we caught up with him, he wasn't in a mood to be charitable to Novell. On Friday the Utah company, which markets the SuSE Linux distribution, revealed that it was entering into a partnership with Microsoft. Redmond would pay Novell an undisclosed sum in return for Novell recognizing Microsoft's intellectual property claims. Novell received a 'Covenant' promising that it wouldn't be sued by Microsoft.
"It's a case of 'Damn the people who write the software'", he told us.
"Novell is in a desperate position - it has a smaller share of the market than Debian,"" he told The Register.
Update: Novell responds to community's questions:
here,
here and
here.
Update 2: Havoc Pennington's
take.