Novell's press release on partnership with Microsoft [LWN.net]

Novell's press release on partnership with Microsoft

Posted Nov 3, 2006 15:06 UTC (Fri) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093)
In reply to: Novell's press release on partnership with Microsoft by bojan
Parent article: Novell's press release on partnership with Microsoft

Is there any way that the converse could apply? i.e. instead of interpretation 1, we use interpretation 2?

1)Pessimistic
"If Novell requires a patent license to distribute software, then it loses all rights under the GPL"

2)Optimistic:
"Novell obtains a patent license to distribute software. Because it is GPL, everyone else is automatically covered".

(Log in to post comments)

Only paid-for Suse products are protected

Posted Nov 4, 2006 10:39 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

Go read this :

http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/community...
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/patent_ag...

The covenant does not apply to opensuse users, let alone anyone else.
Even SLES betas are only covered 180 days at most.

Only paid-for Suse products are protected

Posted Nov 4, 2006 23:04 UTC (Sat) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736) [Link]

See this clause:

“Covenanted Customers” means an enterprise or individual that utilizes a specific copy of a Covered Product for its intended purpose as authorized by a Party in consideration for Revenue (directly or indirectly) to such Party. Enterprises or individuals are not Customers when they (1) resell, license, supply, distribute or otherwise make available to third parties additional copies of the specific cop(ies) of a Covered Product they otherwise utilize as a Customer; or (2) resell, license, supply, or distribute the output of SDKs or embedded developer kits they utilize as a Customer. For avoidance of doubt, an enterprise or individual cannot qualify both as a Customer and Distributor for use of the same copy of a Covered Product.

So if you buy a copy of a covered Novell product and then distribute it as you are legally entitled to do by the copyright license, you void your covenant protection.

By subsection 2, above, you also lose that purported patent protection if you use a copy of gcc, say, and then distribute the binaries you compile wit hit.

Microsoft's goal has always been to destroy free/open source software and bind it with constraints that permit not one iota of freedom more than what Microsoft would themselves give you with their proprietary source/commercial software. Certainly, all the language of this deal speaks to that.

"We promise not to sue you, if you promise not to do unnatural things with the software, like copy it, modify it, distribute it, or anything else we might have difficulty competing with."

Utterly foul.