Deal with Microsoft looking good for Novell

When Novell signed up a deal with Microsoft, all OpenSource world really couldnt bear with that. As you know SuSe Linux, one of the flagship product, easily configurable and a well known Linux distribution in corporate as well user community came to an agreement with Microsoft; As per the deal, Microsoft is going to pay a huge junk of money and free from all claimed-patent violations; In return Novell would be making SuSe Linux interoperable with Windows and allowing microsoft to provide the tech support for its operating system.

Well, it is known to all world that Opensource initiative was done in order to bring down the monopoly from the Big players and Linux community could not accept the deal as they thought it would not be good for the future of Linux.

Soon after that deal, Richard Stallman came into picture. He renewed the GNU Public License from version 2 to version 3; adding more clauses which say if a company comes in a deal with any opensource product, that conditions are going to be extended to other products in the open source community as well. So, after that Microsoft would not able to sue any Linux distributions for patent violations as SuSe upgraded thier license to GPLv3 due to possibility of loosing the oppertunity for OS updates and its components from the open source world.

There was a point when all this deal was looking so stupid and putting the CEO of Novell into big trouble. But his vision and decisions turned out to be best. Today, the market is responding too good for SuSe Linux. The deal with microsoft made them soar high!