Um it seems far more likely that ms is simply agressively entining everyone in the industry into a huge ass will not sue agreement.

Bill Gates is my hero.

nuff said.

Microsoft is sooooo full of it. Their greed is beyond measure. Microsoft needs to go broke. Microsoft has forfieted, in my opinion, any right to fair treatment. I have defended Microsoft in many ways, even though I am a much more loyal Ubuntu user. With this asinine pronouncement of Steve Ballmer's, Microsoft has just lost all credibility and moral power they may have had. Not only do they need to go broke but I sincerely hope they do.

It's obvious Microsoft is playing chicken here. They are betting that everyone will buckle and give in.

It's true that evil men prosper when good men do nothing, so what we need is someone bold and righteous enough to call Microsoft's bluff. OK, you say we infinged, then what did we infringe and let's see your source code to prove infringement. Watch as Microsoft suddenly finds out that it's played its hand a little too much and backtracks expediently.

The only problem with that plan, is that it would create an ex post facto situation. If this was to go into a revision of the GPL, the old revision would still stand as far as the Novell agreement is concerned, so the agreement not to sue Novell would not apply to the rest of them. Also, it would cause Microsoft to require all of them (except Novell) at the same time to agree to their terms on how not to sue, leading to lawsuits as that would not happen and Microsoft will not give them a free pass on having used their intellectual property without some form of payment from each of them.