It seems that this isn’t good news at all. Microsoft threatened Novell with lawsuits and Novell agreed to pay for patents, an agreement that doesn’t cover any other ditribution.

Yes, there are some big questions to be answered, to say the least. This bit from the Patent Cooperation Agreement is a worry:

Enterprises or individuals are not Customers when they (1) resell, license, supply, distribute or otherwise make available to third parties additional copies of the specific cop(ies) of a Covered Product they otherwise utilize as a Customer; or (2) resell, license, supply, or distribute the output of SDKs or embedded developer kits they utilize as a Customer.

On the face of it, this suggests that the aggrement does not cover the distribution of Mono applications or indeed Mono itself, other than by Novell to its customers. That won’t help Mono much, sadly, and could even be counter-productive because it may make other distros less inclined to include Mono. But there is also this, from Novell’s open letter:

Microsoft announced today that it will not assert its patents against individual, non-commercial developers. Novell has secured an irrevocable promise from Microsoft to allow individual and non-commercial contributors the freedom to continue open source development, free from any concern of Microsoft patent lawsuits. That’s right, Microsoft wants you to keep hacking.

My quick reading would be: if you use Mono with software purchased from Novell you won’t be sued. If you use Mono non-commercially you won’t be sued. But if you are using Mono in other contexts, the agreement doesn’t give you any comfort. This hasn’t played out yet.