In a small conference room across the street from the location of Novell’s BrainShare conference, free-software advocate Bruce Perens attacked Novell’s patent deal with Microsoft and said that Novell was enabling Microsoft to run “a protection racket” with the threat of its patents, writes Steve J. Vaughan-Nichols in eWeek’s Linux-Watch.
The story reads: “Perens, a vocal opponent of the Microsoft/Novell patent deal, stated that while the arrangement was legal under the GPLv2, Novell’s deal was made in ‘bad faith with the open-source community and [was] not moral.’
“More than that, though, Perens said, if the Novell-Microsoft patent deal is allowed to stand. It would take only as few as ‘two or three intellectual property law-suits’ of open-source developers or small business at a cost of at least $5 million dollars a pop, to destroy open-source development. So, from where he sits, Novell is running a ‘protection racket’ with ‘Big Mikey’ as the enforcer.”
