I agree with what you are saying as far as the intent, but we all know that the law gets interpreted in ways different than intended. Moglen often says that "law is not code" (To flip Lessig's Code is law), and that it is far more squishy than software code which we can type "make" and know how a CPU will interpret it.

If Novell was getting a "license" for the patents then we would receive two benefits.  First, Novell would be in violation of the GPL and we could sue them.  Second, the license agreement would disclose exactly which patents were being licensed.

Since this is a pact to not sue Novell, then we don't receive any of these two legal benefits.   Instead we get the political harm of having Novell publicly stating that they believe that SuSE infringes Microsoft patents.  SuSE isn't licensing these patents, but getting an assurance from Microsoft that they won't be sued (at least for the moment).

The specific mention of ODF, Mono and Samba in the joint letter is also telling, suggesting that Microsoft is successful both in neutralizing ODF (Now OpenOffice.org will be compatible with Microsoft's formats that went through ECMA, so no need for OASIS/ISO OpenDocument). Mono and Samba can now be presumed to be patent encumbered, and I believe any Novell contributions to these projects should be considered suspect.

This is a massive win for Microsoft, and a major loss for quite a few FLOSS communities (IE: Linux, OpenOffice.org/ODF, Mono and Samba).

Four birds with one stone -- wow, Microsoft is good at what they do!

Russell McOrmond
http://www.flora.ca/
Policy Coordinator for CLUE: Canada's association for Open Source http://www.cluecan.ca/