There is one plausible explanation. Greed. As such Novell has let it put them in a position that amounts to nothing more than a chump player in this soap opera.

This is nothing new. If you look back in history. All monopolies that have fallen had their own chumps. It was a mix of corporations, small companies, individuals and various government agencies.

What is new is the willingness of companies to use the threat of suing their own customers. Now we're not talking about illegally acquired material here. No sir. And that's not even the topper. The threats are so vague and loosely said to the public, no one knows what they're referring to. The only way you would know for sure is to read the deal itself and that ain't gonna happen.

If you would have said to me 6 years ago a corporation would even think to consider
using that even as a threat to get customers to stop using some OS or application. I would have said you were off your nut.

Yet here we are today with a corporation that obviously thinks those are acceptable tactics and losses to maintain their current monopolistic position. What Microsoft is doing is no different had Standard Oil decided to sue their own customers for buying petroleum products from Texaco. And we all know what happened to Standard Oil.

If you look at the history of the automobile industy, something similar happened. Ford wanted to sell inexpensive cars to everyone. Many of the other companies wanted to sell expensive cars to the people with money. Ford couldn't come to an agreement with them, so he started using their patents anyway. The companies got tired of the interminable lawsuit against Ford, so they tried suing Ford's customers. The customers and the judge didn't like that. Ford won due to his competitors' tactics.

Before suing the customers, M$ will now have the painstaking work to run behind the GPL and its changes:

Saying their deal would not infringe GPL2. And M$ sell [! directly or indirectly, anyway receiving royalties] Linux widely. After, GPL3 puts harder terms, so that M$ needs some time to change them license or find another way out. Then during that time, M$ cannot offer updates to them customers, lost its reliability and its customers. Even when M$ finding other [paying Linux-]customers, GPL4 will make harder conditions, so that M$ again temporarily lose reliability and customers. Etc.

For this transformation machine of M$ customers towards Linux, its important to put on the beginning low conditions (f.ex. affirm that the M$/Nowell deal is GPL2-ok), and afterwards to harden the GPL only slowly, so that M$ always sees a way to 'adapt' them to it, and at each step the most high number of former M$-customers buy Linux and afterwards, when update stops, select free distros. :)

Another thing that makes it absurd is that most customers have absolutely NO WAY to know if the software they are using infringes a patent. Are they supposed to hire a legion of programmers to work cooperatively with a legion of lawyers to compair millions of lines of code to hundreds of thousands of software patents?

Consummers Legislation -- The most european legislations, and also these of other countries (such, like Brazil with its law 8098), apply the modern theory of factual, total and solidary(collective) responsibility in their consumer legislation. Thats a kind of reducing successively responsibilities to smaller groups which are 'nearer' the fault. That increase a little the number of sues (as the practics show, only insignificantely) but is much more just than any other solution.

In frent of the customer, are responsible all 'producers' collectively, for the pure fact (independently of their fault) of any problem, inclusively for lack of informations, wrong propaganda or whatever. Producer is anybody whom participate anyhow on production, delivering, propaganda, profits. Especially there are completely irrelevant any excusions w.r.t. whom of the producers have the fault for what; how is the responsibility among them - such like, contracts among them - etc, as naturally the customer dont know these relations only among them and easily fakeable by the producers in any customer sue. And this also excludes other abuses such as the accumulation of the rights by one or some of the firmas (f.ex. receive payments) but at the same time divide and scatter infinitively their obligations (f.ex., in case of reclamations by the customer). All ways to escape are closed by general prohibitions to violate the spirit of the law, but also (beside of these material laws) by processual law that the consummers jurisdiction can 'create law'/jurisprudence by the equality principle, observing the social function of commerce.

The customer can take one, some, or all of them - as he want - and sue them for the whole fullfilling of the propaganda or contract, damage, etc. Afterwards, its a problem among them to regress them against thatone who is 'nearer' the fault; in this regression then them are 'customers' relatively to the sued ones. In the practics, this dont give endless processes, but in opposite to what happens otherwise (i.e. that the producers keep together, and the consummer seldom would get his rights), already in the process by the (end-)customer/consummer these produtors dont keep together but are normally each against the other, exhibite them contracts and responsibilities - normally in vain in that first process as them responsibility is objective/factual because of their mere participation as 'producer' but the regression among them then goes quickly.

Under these legislations, the M$ / Novell deal (trying to create, imply, or 'protect'/'indemnize' the end-users by mutual patent violations or whatever damages between producers/profiters) is illegal ad initium - it's even an absurdity. But independently, even if happening, any consumer or user of Linux win immediately the process, reducing the responsibility to the producers among them.

This is the natural and correct treatment of such absurdities. And the occurence of this M$/Novell deal - inclusive what will violate other state's public and souvereignity services and rights (development and use of a free, independent, transparent OP sistem and progs) should bring governments of other countries to adopt these principles also.

Microsoft has no interest in linux beyond destroying the community behind it.

I believe that their main goal with this recent interest in linux is to divide the community. One side supports microsoft and the other does not.