I see. One more question. Red Hat offers indemnification protection for
it's customers, where if a patent suite is filed against the user of Red
Hat, Red Hat will pay legal fees, and supply resources to fight the
case.
It is an assurance to the customers and not a license or agreement with any one holding patent. Red Hat says if at all there is such a thing as patent violation we will fight for you and replace the infringing code or pay royalties so that you can continue to work without any worry. IANAL and not too sure about the full implecations of Red Hat's assurance program.
But what Novell has done is that, it has accepted that there is a violation already by agreeing to pay royalties and they license MS patents for their customers while Red Hat doesn't license any patents and what they are doing is a pro-active step.
If I create a distro based on fedora, and get sued for patent
violations, Red Hat will not protect me. How is this different?
Red Hat doesn't license any patents for RHEL customers either while Novell explicitly did it with the agreement which is against GPL.
Regards
Praveen