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 license? I need a lawyer to explain…

like if Novell includes GPLv3 code in SUSE (if Microsoft allows them to), and if a coupon gets cashed in after GPLv3 is in SUSE, and if it’s proven that the coupons are equivalent to distributing…

For this to happen a Microsoft distributed Novell SLES coupon has to be used after at least one program licensed with the GPLv3 is included in the Novell SLES distro. So far Novell says they will include GPLv3 software in SLES. Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to realize their mistake. Richard Stallman noted:

“Microsoft is scrambling to dispose of as many Novell SLES coupons as possible prior to the adoption of GPLv3. Unfortunately for Microsoft, those coupons bear no expiration date, and paragraph 6 has no cut-off date. Through its ongoing distribution of coupons, Microsoft will have procured the distribution of GPLv3-covered programs as soon as they are included in Novell SLES distributions, thereby extending patent defenses to all downstream recipients of that software by operation of paragraph 6.”

Novell noted in their recent 10-K filing that “Microsoft may cease to distribute SUSE Linux coupons in order to avoid the extension of its patent covenants to a broader range of GPLv3 software recipients”. Microsoft has indicated they don’t believe their coupons amount to participating in the distribution of a GNU/Linux distro anyway, so they don’t accept that they are subject to any version of the GPL. But it does appear Microsoft and Novell made a mistake by exploiting a loophole in the GPLv2 just at the time the GPLv3 was being drafted.