Covenants, licenses, and GPL virality

Covenants, licenses, and GPL virality

Posted Nov 10, 2006 2:10 UTC (Fri) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510)
In reply to: Covenants, licenses, and GPL virality by giraffedata
Parent article: On Novell and Microsoft

Where is the spirit or letter of GPL offended here?

The spirit of the patent language in the GPL is that we all hang together lest we each hang separately.

Any patent rights in connection with the software must be granted to everyone, not to one party while excluding another party. This is done with the strategic goal of making GPL software usable by everyone, using the tactic of prohibiting anyone from negotiating a patent solution that applies only to their business. If you want to benefit from the work of the community (in the GPL software), anything you do about patent rights must help to protect the entire community from patents.

The agreement between Novell and Microsoft that is mentioned in the form 8K appears to have the intent of circumventing that language of the GPL. If it did not, the two companies would not have used this odd structure of directly granting covenants to each others customers and not licenses to each other.

The premise of the use of covenants in this case is that when party A agrees not to exercise its rights against party B, we're supposed to believe a legal fiction that this is not a grant of any rights to party B.

Bruce

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