Am I in big trouble?

You forgot DEAD in your description of the grandmothers

There are several problems with this. Even if Open Source did,which I do not believe it does in any way that cannot be immediately rectified(For example the FAT modules might be considered that now that MS won the patent on that FileSystem), MS has no clear cut strategy to be able to sue open source. They could sue the companies supporting open source, but that is a mixed bag, as the companies themselves do not claim to own Linux. All they do is sell servers with Linux on it, or provide support for it.

They could sue the companies using Linux, of course we all know how well that turned out for SCO, and what a brilliant image that brought them(And some still suspect MS of having more than a hand in that maneuver as well of course). Difference here is MS has the money to do with SCO could not, carry on a pointless and losing battle until the other company is bankrupt. It is unfortunatly a common tactic these days. But then what happens if the big names all band together to support it, would all of them together have enough money to continue the fight? Probably.

They could try to sue the developers...

Except the majority of the developers are not something that can be sued easily, and of course there is the question of which one do you sue. You sue one that had nothing to do with the code in question, does it do much good?

So their best course of action will be to sue those they want to give them money.

Now that being aside, with the exception of very recent IP patents(Good grief I hate that system), I don't believe they have a good case to base it off of anyways. Even in the recent IP of the FAT FS and such, I am not sure they can prove a loss of sales based off that anymore. Windows is not suited to embedded devices, which is the primary place where FAT is used these days. What this is doing though is trying to scare folks into using MS. Gotta love fear tactics. In other venues that might almost be called other names, somewhat akin to 1920s style mob activity. Using fear to control the actions of others.

Seablade

Its probably worth becoming familiar with a couple of legal battles regarding that sort of patent entrapment behaviour:

RAMBUS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus#Lawsuits

Dell VL Bus
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...20and%20Patent

and (wow, interesting, hadn't realised there was a copy of this snagged on the Linux Today site)
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story...-20-OP-CY-0020
that last one is now out of date on the W3C aspects - W3C has a fully RF patent policy and no RAND. But with an interesting 'bite me and all bets are off' clause

Quite a bit (un)fortuantly. Samba obviously, Mono is another one, which just got a working self sustaining VB.net compiler, they have the arguably best setup for workgroups out there in their software on linux at the moment. No Novell can't just die. CJCox will probably back me up on that one without much problem. However I do think they are realizing how big a slap in the face(PR if nothing else) they made when they signed that agreement. It just gave fuel to Ballmer, and his scare tactics. My question is now, what can they do to fix it. Seablade

I'll back you up on not getting rid of SUSE. Not sure if anyone likes the fact that Novell did the deal with Microsoft. Oddly, it hasn't had the detrimental effect that anti-SUSE folks have desired... at least not yet.

With regards to lawsuits... this was coming with or without the infamous Novell deal. And no... Microsoft probably isn't going to sue people who have NO money. They'll go after larger corporations. IANAL, but if you look at some of the recent cases and how they've come out... you'll see that it's pretty much a toss up whether sanity and justice reign in the courts or not. Microsoft has a large patent arsenal. I can guarantee you that technologies inside of Linux infringe on the patents.... now... whether or not the patent is "valid" is another question. If you don't believe that (which is hard to imagine)... use Google's patent search system and read the patents that Microsoft owns. It's sad, funny and ominous at the same time.

Also, like many gorilla-sized companies, Microsoft typically uses their arsenal to defend themselves against infringement claims. So they are usually the one being "attacked" (duh... they have big bucks!). I really don't think Microsoft is so stupid to bite the hand that feeds them... so I think Balmer is barking loudly from behind a very strong fence.

I still see the deal (like it or not) as getting Linux into some of the impenetrable enterprises. Which is always a good thing. Will it save Novell? Not sure. They may have bought themselves some breathing room... which is also perfectly ok.

Should we make the goal of the Linux community the destruction of Novell and SUSE? I don't think so. Should we make the goal of the GPLv3 to specifically punish companies for having patents? I'm not sure Linux is ready to blackmail people into change .. not yet.

Since 99% of the people here fall into the Novell-hate camp... I'll just say that there's a whole lot of more productive things we could be doing than trying to shoot the person that shook hands with Microsoft. Oddly, most of the nay-sayers are very much into the idea of integrating their Linux systems with Windows... which is more like planting a big sloppy wet one on the lips of Steve Balmer himself.... oh well. But before you turn your guns to your heads and pull the trigger... again... this would not be the best thing for Linux.

My two cents...

It really has. It has made nearly everyone think twice, take a second look around and see where they stand in regards to Novell, Linux, their solutions, and their ethics. That by itself is a bad thing in business. If your customers start looking around and reanalyzing whether they should remain your customer, that is a sign you have done something wrong. Now what I think you were referring to was a mass migration away from Suse, you are right a mass migration has not happened, but a decent one has at the personal desktop level(Not enterprise which is where Suse makes the majority of their money). One thing they have going for them, something that even RedHat has admitted, is the sales from MS of their product. Then again RedHat also said, sure use up all the tickets and lets get it over with. Thing is, MS did one of the major things that could have helped Novell... MS gave Novell a reason to fight them(Poor choice of words, but I am to tired at the moment to come up with what I am looking for, not quite as strong as fight, more like disagreement), repair their image somewhat, and gave a distraction to turn angst against. Now whether this is a business plan or not I leave to other conspirators to talk about. I will say though that this is not true. It is more along the lines of SuseDistro-Dislike, combined with Novell-Mistrust camp for many here. Even those of us that have been more vocal about that string of events that really fits much better. It is amazing how much I have seen this line of thought come up recently actually. If this deal did nothing else, as I mentioned above, it made people look around at their current state of affairs. Not even just those involved with Novell at that. It would be very interesting if that however sparked a renaissance of organization that provided a much stronger platform. Seablade

Well... certainly it was "self serving"... but you know... last time I checked... that's pretty much how businesses operate (?). With regards to Canonical, just remember that there used to be a company called Thawte that attempted to monopolize the certificate market and the owner cashed out for big bucks... leaving behind the legacy of the monopoly he established. And that my friend is probably just a bit more selfish than anything Novell has done since its SUSE acquisition. Perhaps Canonical is what happens when you feel really guilty about how you rooked the entire world??