OT: Novell Is Not SCO

Craig White craigwhite at azapple.com
Sun Nov 12 20:35:30 UTC 2006


On Sun, 2006-11-12 at 14:11 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-11-12 at 13:41, Craig White wrote:
> 
> > speculating on what patent rights Microsoft might wish to assert is
> > something I am hardly qualified to do but if you want to indulge
> > yourself, feel free. Your statement that this isn't going to play out
> > well suggests a pessimistic view of sorts.
> 
> Which patent or when someone wants to assert it isn't the
> point.  The problem I see is inherent in the GPL, which will
> prohibit _any_ distribution of covered content if there are
> any other restrictions.  Section 2b says: 
>   "You must cause any work that you distribute or publish,
>    that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the
>    Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at
>    no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
> and section 6 includes:
>   "You may not impose any further restrictions on the
>    recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."
> 
> So including patent indemnity to your direct customers through
> some arrangement is not enough to permit GPL distribution to
> continue if in fact a patent covers any part of it and you
> cannot grant unlimited redistribution rights.  Samba could
> easily be killed by any such patent claim regardless of the
> actual terms of licensing the patent.
----
I believe that the FSF / FSLC was more concerned with a potential
violation of section 7 of the GPL (v2) but since they (Eben Moglen) have
been invited to review the complete contractual agreement...

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2168151/novells-opens-microsoft

we are certain to know what the official position of the FSF/FSLC is
going to be.

Craig




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