On the back of defending the agreement this week, Novell did as promised and published details of its landmark November 2006 Linux partnership agreements with Microsoft.

In part 4 of a 5 part series on the new version of the most commonly used free/open source license, today we take a look at one of the reasons it took so long to create–the Microsoft/Novell patent deal.

Danger from the Deep, an Open Source World War II german uboat simulation, striving for technical and historical accuracy, is now in its 0.3 incarnation. This latest version features a considerable amount of new features as well as tons of bug fixes. Amongst the new features, Dangerdeep now appears in full OpenGL2.0/GLSL1.1 goodness.

Microsoft is regretting the way it handled the patent protection deal with Novell and other Linux vendors, according to open-source advocates.

Linux developers wonder if the kernel's famous code quality is in danger. If it is, they might not know until it's too late.

Law.com recently ran a sensationalist piece by Edmund J. Walsh warning of the impending “dangerous real world business dispute” in store for any for-profit company that uses free software. Walsh points to lawsuits filed by SFLC on behalf BusyBox as a source of this danger, and having worked on those lawsuits, I hope I can provide a helpful counterpoint.

Novell critics are seen in other Web site too... ...

"Microsoft made a few mistakes in the Novell-Microsoft deal, and GPLv3 is designed to turn them against Microsoft, extending that limited patent protection to the whole community," explains GPLv3 co-author Richard M. Stallman.

I've been trying to catch on and to understand what this thread's all about (It started with R. Hovespian from Novell explaining why they needed a deal with MS). I thought, maybe I could try to summarize it all to understand - and maybe explain to others - what's happening here, so I made up a tale of the whole situation