Open source software heavyweight and Novell vice president Miguel de Icaza this week publicly slammed the Novell-Microsoft cross patent licensing deal. De Icaza, a co-founder of the open source Gnome desktop project, joined Novell in 2003 when the big-N bought his companyl, Ximian.

“I’m not happy about the fact that such an agreement was made, but [the decision] was above my pay grade; I think we should have stayed with the open-source community,” de Icaza said.

Linuxworld reports that de Icaza, speaking on a panel at the MIX 08 conference in Las Vegas, said that Novell had done the best it could to balance open source interests with patent indemnification. However, if he had his way, the company would have remained strictly open source and not have got into bed with Microsoft. Novell entered into a controversial multimillion dollar cross-patent licensing and interoperability deal with Microsoft in November 2006.