On Novell and Microsoft

On Novell and Microsoft

Posted Nov 8, 2006 0:41 UTC (Wed) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510)
In reply to: On Novell and Microsoft by iabervon
Parent article: On Novell and Microsoft

Perhaps they have a patent license for royalty-free redistribution of any GPL work by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through Novell.

Well, they've already said it doesn't work that way. They get Microsoft to issue a covenant not to sue to every Novell customer.

But if they did have the sort of license you describe, the whole world could hitch-hike upon it, including Red Hat.

Perhaps they have a patent license for royalty-free redistribution of any GPL work by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through Novell.

The GPL says "The act of running the program is not restricted" and the language which places activities like use out of its scope is meant to say that those activities are not restricted. Elsewhere in the license is language that does not allow further restrictions upon GPL software, be they for running or any other purpose. So, I don't think a judge would rule that a patent license that allowed distribution but not running would be within the terms of the GPL.

Bruce

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