The bad press Novell received is symptomatic of being the "first one in the pool." The open source idealists in the crowd can complain all they want: there will be others joining Novell in the pool before long. I don't think this move won't add much to the long-term competitiveness of Novell, but they get credit for being the first one to make it work.

Looking at the underlying structure of the Clippie-Meets-The-Penguin deal, you quickly start to appreciate the legal complexity of what has been done. It's the licensing terms and the covenants not to sue which are causing concerns in the open source community. There are fears that this deal somehow "violates the spirit of the GPL," as one commentator put it.

Last time I checked, spirit violation wasn't sufficient to break the GPL and like it or not, it appears that the legal eagles have a found a clever way to preserve the integrity of GPL code while at the same time protecting a proprietary software package. One would hope that the legal resources of Novell and Microsoft were fluent enough with the issues to realize that the letter of the GPL had to be respected, else the whole premise falls apart in very short order. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings here, but the spirit of the GPL may be too ethereal to have much sway in the business world.

From another angle, the fact that this deal has been done at all should help put the whole FUD approach to combating open source into perspective. It may be tricky, but clearly a traditional corporate can interface with an open source offering without having to sacrifice all their IP rights.

However I look at this I keep reaching the same conclusions: (1) It was inevitable; (2) it will give users more choices; and (3) it won't be nearly so scary sounding in three months. The only thing that bugs me is the voice in my head that keeps repeating, "That's right....come to Daddy...."