Whew, man, there is so much speculation on the Internet about Microsoft's recent Linux agreement's, it could fill a book! Gosh—Novell, Samsung, Linspire, Xandros and Fuji Xerox have all inked agreements with Microsoft over Linux.

Novell's Pact
The Linux congregation denounced the agreement between Microsoft and Novell as evil. Most characterized the agreement as a pact with the devil and Novell being accused as a sellout. At the emotional level, I'm in total agreement. I was shocked too. What Novell did is the equivalent of flying an F-22 to China and defecting. Treasonous.

However, Novell did receive huge sums of money, $240 million. Money that can be invested to benefit open source and the Linux community at large. The only drawback is that the investment is at the sole discretion of Novell. Novell also has to pay Microsoft a percentage of its revenue based on SUSE Enterprise Linux for Microsoft not to sue Novell customers.

Linspire
There really is not much here. Linspire basically licensed RT Audio Codec, Windows Media 10 Codecs and TrueType fonts. I'm sure Linspire is paying a licensing fee for these codecs. Microsoft also licenses these same codecs to the embedded market for use in DVD players and so forth. The only notable item from the Linspire announcement is that Linspire is paying Microsoft to not sue its user base.  If end users of Linux really want to license Microsoft codecs for playblack, they can always buy them from Fluendo.

Xandros
Again, really not much here. Xandros is probably paying Microsoft to not sue its customers based on revenue of its Linux sales. Xandros also licensed some server communications protocols. Xandros should have been able to license these protocols due to the recent Microsoft anti-trust action in the United States and Europe.

What does all this mean? For starters, it signals that Microsoft recognizes Linux as a player. The immediate down side is that Microsoft is getting a percentage of the Linux and open source revenue for the promise not to take legal action on unspecified patent claims. This is the rub, open source developers are not being given the opportunity to inspect what IP Microsoft purports that open source infringes. All the while the likes of Novell are making back room monetary transactions on code they don't even own! In the past, even when I could download a distro for free, I would still purchase the retail package to help support Linux development.

What is Microsoft after? They are after the server market. Virtualization is the future of the data center. Microsoft wants to be the host and allow Linux to guest rather than Linux host and Microsoft guest. When Microsoft threatens with unsubstantiated IP claims, Novell and others cower. Its a win-win for Microsoft. Microsoft receives Linux development support from Novell and others to ensure that Longhorn's built-in virtualization will guest the Linux operating system and Microsoft gets a percentage of the Linux revenue too. You can be sure that Microsoft will push Longhorn hard, and play the Linux card only when they really have to. Another upside for Microsoft is that they can turn to the anti-trust regulators and say, “see, we are playing nice”.

What is the future remedy for the open source community? Its called the GNU General Public License version 3. The GPLv3 has specific clauses to prevent the surrender of open source code to third parties who use discriminatory patent licenses, such as the recent Novell/Microsoft agreement. However, the GPLv3 is not retroactive. The developer has to move his or her code to GPLv3 and all previous versions remain licensed under whatever license that version of code happened to use.