Groklaw over the weekend posted all the juicy details on a recent legal battle between Microsoft and Novell over a deposition of Bill Gates in a lingering antitrust suit. Novell's lawyers argued that they deserved more time to quiz Gates about his involvement in decisions alleged to have squelched WordPerfect in the mid-1990s. Microsoft's lawyers saidNovell wasted the initial four hours they got with him.

In the end, Novell was granted more time, but not before their back-and-forth resulted in the disclosure of a transcript (PDF) of their first session with the Microsoft chairman, conducted on March 4 of this year. It will be an entertaining read for anyone who has followed the company over the years.

"Can you tell me what Cairo was?" the Novell lawyer asks at one point, referring to one of Microsoft's most legendary stumbles, an attempt at big operating system advances in the early 1990s. After years of work, it never came to fruition as envisioned.

"They are still writing books trying to figure that out," Gates replied, saying Cairo was about "putting some new capabilities in the operating system." Gates noted that some of the work for Cairo ended up in Windows NT-based products, but he acknowledged that "many of those features ... still haven't been realized today."

In their letter to the judge in the case, Microsoft's lawyers argued that Gates "should be protected from harassing and time-wasting depositions by those who seek to distract him from his important charitable work." But with flashbacks like Cairo, it's no wonder Gates wasn't exactly keen on sitting down for another few hours. A transcript of the subsequent session hasn't been made public.

The ongoing WordPerfect case is what remains following a 2004 settlement between the companies. Microsoft and Novell nowadays might be best characterized as frenemies, still fighting it out in court and in the market but collaborating on Windows and Linux interoperability and a controversial set of patent protections.