Much of the speculation over the first Linux patent lawsuits filed last week against Red Hat and Novell revolved around whether or not Microsoft-famously vocal about its belief that its patents were being violated by the open source operating system-were somehow involved behind the scenes, even though the company bringing the suits had not been tied to them previously. And much of the response to the speculation has been, well, that's sort of crazy, because Microsoft just did a deal with Novell specifically to indemnify them against such actions.

Now, in your particularly dark conspiracy theory, that doesn't mean much of anything, and there is some logic that suggests it might be in Microsoft's long term interests to see Novell sued, but on the face of it, I think most people accept it's generally bad practice to start litigation against someone you are trying to make money with. In Microsoft's case this is probably less true-they aren't going to make much off the Novell deal itself, it's more the implications which they benefit from-but it turns out that Novell doesn't think this is so odd after all. I had no idea that their anti-trust suit against Microsoft was still proceeding.

Call me naive-I knew they had sued Microsoft, but I had assumed that in the course of their indemnification deal that this was one of the things that would also have been negotiated to a conclusion. I understand that it can be in both company's interests to pursue different venues for negotiation in separate business matters, but there is still some part of me that thinks this is just kinda crazy. And it certainly undermines my faith that these companies are not crazy enough to start suing their own customers-if you are going to take a business partner to court, maybe it's not such a stretch to start taking customers there as well.