"Not since SCO has there been a company so reviled by the open
source community as Novell following its deal with Microsoft.
Already there are some clear signs of the negative effects of that
anger: senior coders have left the company; Novell has posted a
loss for the most recent quarter; and there are calls for a boycott
of Novell products--to say nothing of imminent changes to the GNU
GPL that might well nullify the entire Novell-Microsoft deal. Some
people are rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of Novell
crashing and burning completely, but such a development could
actually turn out to be one of the worst things to happen to free
software.
"One reason why Novell has had so much vitriol heaped upon it is
that until that deal with Microsoft, it seemed to be a company that
really got open source..."
