never acts in any distinguishable way to gain market advantage over other Linux vendors by such "indemnity" then they are GPL2 clear.

On a side note, the whole issue of indemnity is one I find a bit troubling.  I have always felt that IBM is perhaps the only party in all this that has remained true to its statements - they've said there is no need for indemnification and have stuck to that position.  It seems like every other major distributor (at least) has at some point decided to go down the indemnification road.

they are in violation of GPL2, because they will be licensing/distributing GPL material to others who will have less rights to that same material than they.

Novell will have the right to distribute with patent indemnity, but their downstream recipients will not.