Not their customers, apparently. Matthew Aslett got to talk with a joint Novell/Microsoft guinea pig (I mean, customer :-), HSBC, and the support for the IP indemnity is underwhelming, at best:It’s a nice to have. I don’t think it was a main feature for me, but it’s nice to have.Delivery in a bright pink box is also nice to have. So is a hug from Steve Ballmer. But if I'm out selling the patent deal, I'd want mo Not their customers, apparently. Matthew Aslett got to talk with a joint Novell/Microsoft guinea pig (I mean, customer :-), HSBC, and the support for the IP indemnity is underwhelming, at best:It’s a nice to have. I don’t think it was a main feature for me, but it’s nice to have.Delivery in a bright pink box is also nice to have. So is a hug from Steve Ballmer. But if I’m out selling the patent deal, I’d want more of a vote of confidence than that. But then, as Matthew notes, there’s not much to love about the patent deal: If you’re a Novell customer, the deal gives you peace of mind that Microsoft won’t sue you, which it wasn’t going to do anyway, for code that may or may not be in Linux, that may or may not infringe Microsoft patents. If you’re a Microsoft customer, the deal gives you peace of mind that Novell won’t sue you, which it wasn’t going to do anyway, for code that may or may not be in Windows, that may or may not infringe Novell patents. No problem, you might think, except that it also provides the opportunity for an awful lot of FUD.Interestingly, I heard through the grapevine that Novell has been struggling to provide incentives for its sales force to sell the Microsoft-sponsored SUSE licenses. Why? Because they were hardly getting comp’d on these at all, much to the sales team’s dismay. Instead of getting a new Porsche with their multi-million dollar deals, they’re lucky to get a Matchbox Car. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you…. But then, Novell’s sales team isn’t, apparently, feeding the company. Microsoft’s sales team is. And that, my friends, should give every single Novell employee, partner, and customer pause. Why would your company’s success depend on the very company that most wants to obliterate you, once it takes care of Red Hat (which, by the way, it’s doing an amazingly shoddy job of). Foolish, foolish Novell. At least it’s changing the commission policy for Microsoft sales. Not 100% commissionable sales, but a lot better than the pennies they were paying before. Maybe this will enable Novell to dig itself even deeper into the Microsoft hole. Open Source