On December 29th Jeremy Allison officially left Novell and was able to speak openly about the Novell-Microsoft deal. He provided answers to questions posed Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet and Boycott Novell although it would appear that his answers to the later source were for the most part copied and pasted from his ZDNet interview. What is interesting from the interviews is that the controversial patent deal was included by Microsoft at the last minute (5 days before the announcement). This would suggest Novell was setup by Microsoft, or even worse intentionally withheld information from people within their own company that understood the most about the issues at hand. Whichever was the cause it does not bode well for Novell as it was a lot of negative publicity they could have seriously done without and even avoided if managed more effectively.