Yesterday as well as the day before that, some of the press reopened a jar of worms and spoke about Microsoft’s software patents minefield, but bloggers did not pay any attention to Novell’s fight against the free in “Free software”. Novell is just about as guilty as Microsoft because without its participation and pasive endorsement Microsoft’s efforts would hold no water.

Jeff Jaffe's broken link (still available in the CTO blog) shows fanaticism for software patents at Novell; Microsoft's cash infusion for Novell is running out

Yesterday we wrote about Novell’s news from China and warned that Microsoft and Novell had begun to share some more vocabulary. Several more articles have since then been published to cover the new announcement, including this one.

Not just Mono but OOXML too is being used by Novell to promote and to spread Microsoft formats with software patents

Novell still uses software patents protection as a business proposition to users of SUSE

In response to the news this week that the city of Los Angeles is going Googlefied with a $7.25 million, five-year deal to adopt Gmail, Google Calendar and other applications, Novell's blog has an interesting rebuttal. Of course, the reason for the city's switch to Google's corner of the cloud is to save money that it would otherwise spend on expensive software licenses, and it will save.

Novell's CMO John Dragoon published this article in Forbes, so his subordinates promoted it in Novell's PR blog and his personal professional blog too. It was about "open source". Also mentioned in Tectonic was Novell's IDG "study" that we last mentioned in this post.

As we discover time and time again, Novell sells snake oil not only in countries where software patents are invalid and Microsoft’s claims remain totally unsubstantiated, but also in countries where none of this has any legitimacy. Novell helps Microsoft spread misconceptions and uses these to market itself. It makes it a direct opponent of Free software.

Novell’s recent news about China [1, 2, 3] is pretty significant because this shows what tricks Microsoft and Novell hope to make more widespread and prevalent around the world, not just in Asia. It’s a symbolic start that illustrates just why Novell has become dangerous to GNU/Linux adoption (contrary to common belief).