An Open Leter to Novell CEO Hovserpian from Bruce Perens (you can also add your comments there)

"To Mr. Hovsepian,

The Open Source community would find little to criticize in your agreement with Microsoft, had it remained a strictly financial and technical agreement. As the agreement stands today, it betrays the authors of the software you re-market and their users worldwide for Novell's sole commercial benefit.

The covenant of the GPL is that in the face of a software patent aggressor we must all hang together, lest we each hang separately. Novell accepted that covenant when you chose to include the Linux kernel, the GNU C library, and hundreds of additional works created at no charge to Novell by individuals in the Free Software community and licensed under the GPL.

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 licenses to each other, in order to circumvent Novell's earlier agreement with the community of GPL software developers. ........................

Read full story http://techp.org/petition/show/1

Regards Praveen