>There's no evidence that it happened either way. But, I will remind you that according to the article you referenced in the first post in this thread, Novell approached Microsoft...not the other way around.

And if they did, so what? From the same section of the same article:

"In addition, Microsoft gave Novell another $108 million as a "balancing payment" in connection with the patent part of the deal."

The MS-Novell deal left a bad taste in the mouths of many people; some regard it as a clever exploitation of a loophole in the GPLv2. Nonetheless, from the quote above it's clear FOSS has a strong patent position of its own that MS can't ignore.

There are few organizations in the known universe better equipped to fund legal battles than MS. If their position is so cut-and-dried why do they not simply file suit? They won't put up, but they won't shut up either. SCO deja vu.

Anyone wanting some background on this issue can start with the high-moderated comments on SlashDot: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/14/0018242&threshold=1

>
>>That goes completely against FOSS philosophy. Novell may have signed an NDA, but I doubt it because even if they had, and MS detailed their allegations to Novell, someone at Novell probably would have anonymously leaked them in the format I laid out below, which hasn't happened yet. This actually reinforces my thinking that MS never detailed their allegations to Novell, regardless of what else was discussed or signed.
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>>And even if Novell did sign an NDA and it's somehow not been leaked, that's no guarantee that other likely targets of MS such as Red Hat and IBM would sign. Not to mention the core Linux committers.