This part of what Mr. Hovsepian said does not make any sense:
Novell has a significant patent portfolio, and in reflection of this fact, the agreement we signed shows the overwhelming balance of payments being from Microsoft to Novell
At last count, Microsoft has 5834 US patents, Novell has 279. You can check this yourself by going here and typing an/microsoft then an/novell in the query box: http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.htm If each company's payment receive for "patent protection" is proportional to the number of patents that company holds, as Mr. Hovsepian implies, Novell should have paid Microsoft more than 20 times the amount that Microsoft paid Novell. Either Mr. Hovsepian is confused or he would still rather not explain the reason for the large payment from Microsoft to Novell. Saill On 11/21/2006 01:52 AM, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
We've updated the material at: http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/
There's now an letter from our CEO Ron Hovsepian, I quote it in full below,
Andreas
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