I know from personal experience that it's quite possible to get one's moral knickers in a twist -- to work oneself into a lather of ethical indignation -- without any substantial basis. Is this the position of those of us in the open-source software community who object vociferously to the recent deal between Novell and Microsoft?

I don't think so. My main basis for not thinking so is the perspective on the deal given by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. I'm relying on cbronline.com here:

"Let me be clear about one thing, we don't license our intellectual property to Linux[. B]because of the way Linux licensing GPL framework works, that's not really a possibility," said Microsoft chief executive, Steve Ballmer.

"Novell is actually just a proxy for its customers, and it's only for its customers," he added. "This does not apply to any forms of Linux other than Novell's SUSE Linux. And if people want to have peace and interoperability, they'll look at Novell's SUSE Linux. If they make other choices, they have all of the compliance and intellectual property issues that are associated with that."

The clear suggestion is: "peace" if you go along with the deal between nice Microsoft and nice Novell, but non-peace (war?) if you prefer to use a variant of Linux other than that provided by Novell. That is, Novell has apparently done a Neville Chamberlain, concluding some sort of "separate peace" with Microsoft.