Comments

• shane coyle

  2007-06-26 09:49:57

  Now, we just need the stars to align right.
  
  I also asked this at that time, and still haven't made a determination, but I also wonder if Novell can skirt the issue by simply avoiding GPLv3 licensed software that is affected by their license with Microsoft.
  
  For instance, Novell confirms that OOO is covered by their right-to-use license for their customers, so they wouldn’t touch that under GPL3, but say K3B (or whatever) for instance isn’t affected by the MS covenant not to sue that Novell is paying royalties for - if Novell includes that under GPLv3 does it have any impact on their MS deal since there is no protection for that to pass on?
  
  Can Novell and Xandros cherry-pick GPLv3 projects that won’t interfere with their discriminatory patent licenses?

• Ciaran O'Riordan

  2007-06-26 21:07:09

  @shane coyle: Can they cherry pick around GPLv3? Not really.
  
  Many of the core components of the operating system were written by GNU and are copyrighted by FSF.
  
  The GNU C Library is one example - a component which Alan Cox said is just as important as the kernel.
  
  GnuPG is another example.
  
  Then there's GCC and GDB, which development ceases in their absense.
  
  And then there's things which people either need or don't want to learn new versions of, such as Gnash, gzip, GIMP, coreutils, Bash, etc.
  
  And that's only the GNU packages. Then there are the other packages that will go GPLv3, like Samba. Sun and MySQL are also talking about using GPLv3.

• shane coyle

  2007-06-27 09:48:39

  But, Novell et al don't have a patent license for GCC and the others, so they haven't any patent license for them to pass on.
  
  Are you saying that under GPLv3 if I distribute, say, GCC I must give up my patents for downstream use for any and all software products, such as OOO? That sounds 'viral' to the extreme.

• Matthew Flaschen

  2007-06-28 06:32:15

  It's not viral. It applies to all GPLv3 software (and OOO is not GPLv3), but not any other programs. Linspire and Xandros (Novell is grandfathered in) will not be able to distribute any GPLv3 software because they signed exclusive patent deals that didn't apply to all downstream users.

• Roy Schestowitz

  2007-06-28 09:14:52

  Thanks for your insights, Matthew. I was never quite sure if Xandros and Linspire fell under the same class as Novell.

• shane coyle

  2007-06-28 10:06:26

  So, basically the only package that Novell distributes that they may have a GPL3 issue with is Samba, and since Novell (I believe) has a MS communication protocols license of some sort, they now likely have access to actual SMB(2) documentation to implement their own without reverse engineering.
  
  Novell would never move Mono to GPL3, nor would they allow OOO to go GPL3, so none of their discriminatory patent licenses will need to be passed on downstream if they avoid Samba under v3. Basically, they are totally untouched by this in practice.
  
  And, I still think it's a bit of a stretch that if you give up all your patents for program X under the GPL3 that every unrelated program Y under v3 is now also covered by any and all patents you may have if you never distributed them.