Janne Karhunen <Janne.Karhunen@gmail.com> writes:
On Wednesday 08 November 2006 03:51, Boyd Lynn Gerber wrote:
At a Novell conference today the advised reading this and if any question post them via the links on the page.
Q1. How is this agreement compatible with Novell's obligations under Section 7 of the GPL? Our agreement with Microsoft is focused on our customers, and does not include a patent license or covenant not to sue from Microsoft to Novell (or, for that matter, from Novell to Microsoft). Novell's customers receive a covenant ^^^^^^^^^
So these guys *hacked* the GPL by making the customer to *sign the deal* with Microsoft instead of them. As customers were NOT consulted when the deal was signed, it was in fact very much Novell that signed the deal. No matter how the Novell tries to get away from this. Quotes from Groklaw¹:
"Get it? Novell doesn't get the promise from Microsoft. Its *end users* do. Ha ha, GPL. Except that the end users are also licensees, according to the GPL license. Licensees who are not allowed to redistribute, Novell and MS told us, without losing the patent promise, speaking of specifics, according to the deal made on their behalf -- without asking them to agree or not -- and on top of the GPL license they already got."
As long as there is no patent infringement, there is no GPL problem. Read the FAQ: Q4. With this agreement, will Novell include Microsoft patented code in its contributions to the open source community? No. Novell will not change its development practices as a result of this agreement. It has always been our policy in all development, open source and proprietary, to stay away from code that infringes another's patents, and we will continue to develop software using these standard practices. If any of our code is found to infringe someone else's patents, we will try to find prior technology to invalidate the patents, rework the code to design around the infringement, or as a last resort remove the functionality. We're not going to ship code that infringes valid patents, Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, aj@suse.de, http://www.suse.de/~aj/ SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126