Microsoft-Novell patent agreement prompts Perens petition

BRUCE PERENS has penned an open letter to Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian which accuses the firm of betrayal.

According to the online petition, here, "It is abundantly clear that Novell and Microsoft took the time to engineer a circuitous legal path of issuing covenants to each other's customers, rather than licences to each other, in order to circumvent Novell's earlier agreement with the community of GPL software developers."

So far 1,259 people have signed the petition. Plenty of end users and engineers have added their own pithy comments on the deal. µ