Comments on: Novell: Really, We Don’t Have a Patent Cross-License

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 12:42:46 +0000

I quite liked the funny criticism in the source of our original post. In reference to Bruce's rebuttal:

Not quite. I mean, thanks for the consistency, but please, could you have somebody who knows what everything is about to rewrite the post? There isn't anything like a ClearType font, but a sub-pixel hinting algorithm for any displayed fonts!

By: shane

shane — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 22:51:05 +0000

should probably reclarify your last remark to say that that perhaps it's not in the spirit of the license I have made that characterization as well, even in the linked article:

By entering into this deal with MS, Novell is in effect limiting recipient’s rights to redistribute GPL’ed code using MS as a proxy. As I have said before, whether or not Novell is violating the letter of the GPL, it is certainly violating its spirit.

But, the GPLv2 preamble clearly defines the purpose and intent of the license:

Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.

By making this discriminatory patent deal in which Microsoft has agreed to not enforce their patent rights for a royalty payment, I believe Novell is not complying with the license's intent.

By: Stephen Holmes

Stephen Holmes — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 22:33:18 +0000

Then technically you’d be wrong and should probably reclarify your last remark to say that perhaps it’s not in the spirit of the license (not wanting to put words in your mouth) . If there’s a patent violation of MS’s in lLinux’s font handling code, then it’s right to disable it in upstream for all distributions that consume it.