In a surprise announcement earlier today at the Open Source Business Conference, Novell and the Electronic Frontier Foundation said that Novell would be contributing to the EFF's Patent Busting project. In addition, the two entities will work for legislation and policies that will "promote innovation," specifically targeting the World Intellectual Property Organization.
EFF's Patent Busting project just turned three years old and has targeted patents ranging from Amazon's 1-Click shopping patent to Nintendo's handheld software emulation patent. So far, a live concert recording patent held by ClearChannel has been overturned, while a patent from Test.com for online test-taking is now being reexamined.
Beyond patent busting, the EFF and Novell will collaborate on patent lobbying efforts. Novell says that it holds over 500 patents, some of which are "fundamental to technologies in the market today." Novell has previously pledged to use its patent portfolio to defend open source against patent attacks and in November 2005 cofounded the Open Invention Network along with IBM, Sony, Red Hat, and Philips.
More recently, Novell has dealing with the ramifications of its cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft. As part of the agreement, Microsoft promised not to use its patent portfolio against Novell's SUSE Linux while continuing to assert that Linux infringes on some of the software giant's patents. Novell signaled its disagreement with Microsoft's stance and said that its agreement with Microsoft was "is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property."
Novell's agreement with Microsoft has been a source of contention within open-source circles, with one Red Hat executive accusing the company of appeasing Microsoft; others have accused Novell of violating the GPL with the agreement. Either way, signing the deal with Microsoft did a lot to sully Novell in the eyes of many Linux users, and Novell's decision to link up with the EFF on patents may have been made with an eye towards getting some of its street cred back with the OSS community.
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