Is the Microsoft-Novell Deal Doomed?

Does there remain any substance to the Novell/Microsoft agreement, now that Novell has had to take a stand on its own? We posed this question to Novell senior PR manager Kevan Barney.
"There certainly is substance to the agreement," he responded. "The intent of our agreement with Microsoft was to deliver two things: interoperability and customer peace of mind. Customers told us they wanted Linux and Windows to work together better in their data centers, so we agreed to develop new interoperability technologies built around open standards."
"As part of the agreement, Novell and Microsoft committed not to sue each other's customers," Barney continued. "Both companies wanted to give our respective customers peace of mind regarding any potential litigation so our customers could focus on their own businesses. We're confident that this agreement meets those two objectives, regardless of any disagreement with Microsoft about intellectual property and Linux. That disagreement was clear between us when the deal was negotiated, and it didn't stop things then, nor will it stop things now."
As for Groklaw's Jones, she believes the "intellectual property bridge" the companies claimed to have built two weeks ago is "a deliberate attempt to sidestep the [General Public License]," under which Linux vendors are bound. After the deal was announced, critics including Jones voiced their opinion that Novell was not in a position to make a deal giving Microsoft any kind of intellectual property compensation on behalf of SUSE Linux users, under the terms of the GPL that Novell claims to support.
What wasn't clear at that time, though, was whether or how anyone could mount a legal challenge to the agreement, nor who would be willing to pit themselves in a court of equity against two legal powerhouses, now siding together.
But as Free Software Foundation attorney Eben Moglen revealed in an interview with Andrew Orlowski of The Register published yesterday, his organization -- which is largely responsible for the GPL's language -- explicitly and unequivocally stated his organization's plan is to combat the Novell-Microsoft agreement by altering the language of the draft of GPL version 3 to disable any such "intellectual property bridge" from being recognized between a license holder and other companies.
"Our strategy is to use GPL 3 against the deal - we're not going to vary that strategy," Moglen told The Register.
As Moglen described, under new draft language currently under consideration by the FSF, any agreement regarding patents made to one subset of other license holders must simultaneously be understood to be valid with regard to all license holders. Moglen did not say whether he considers Microsoft a GPL license holder, though many will claim it's not.
"If GPL 3 goes into effect with these terms in it," Moglen continued, "Novell...suddenly becomes a patent laundry; the minute Microsoft realizes the laundry is under construction it will withdraw." A recent read of the draft version 3 language as it stands currently does not include such language under discussion, though Moglen did say that the FSF intends to publish what it calls a "last-call draft" very soon.
"Eben Moglen seems to have a jujitsu move in mind with GPLv3," Pamela Jones told BetaNews, "which just became a great deal more popular than it was before. Here's what I believe: One way or another, this deal is doomed."