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Royalty free patent peace for GPL software from Microsoft?Royalty free patent peace for GPL software from Microsoft?Posted Aug 1, 2008 22:41 UTC (Fri) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510)In reply to: Royalty free patent peace for GPL software from Microsoft? by mjw Parent article: Bruce Perens: Microsoft and Apache - What's the Angle? (IT Management) I don't think what has changed is good enough for SFLC to opine that you are safe now. But the FAQ change is significant.
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Royalty free patent peace for GPL software from Microsoft? Posted Aug 1, 2008 22:45 UTC (Fri) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link] Could you explain a bit how the FAQ entry is both significant and not enough to provide safety for GPL software developers/projects/users? The OSP FAQ seems to say both yes and no at the same time to the GPL. That seems a little odd. How should one interpret this?
Royalty free patent peace for GPL software from Microsoft? Posted Aug 2, 2008 6:03 UTC (Sat) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Microsoft has published in an official document the following statement:The OSP provides the assurance that Microsoft will not assert its Necessary Claims against anyone who make, use, sell, offer for sale, import, or distribute any Covered Implementation under any type of development or distribution model, including the GPL. That's a legally binding promise, and it provides a legal defense for anyone who relies on it, even if Microsoft later tries to take the promise back. There is a separate statement saying that they aren't sure that the promise is "consistent with open source licensing, namely the GPL". Doesn't matter. As far as I can tell, the language above at least suffices for GPLv2: someone who relies on the promise also relies on that promise being available to all downstream parties. For GPLv3, IANAL so I'm not sure, but it seems good. My guess is that after being burned so many times by patents themselves, Microsoft prefers to rely on their head start and the huge size of the spec, rather than fear of patent lawsuits, to maintain their Office near-monopoly, and the promise is just to get governments off their back.
Royalty free patent peace for GPL software from Microsoft? Posted Aug 4, 2008 10:56 UTC (Mon) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link] There is a separate statement saying that they aren't sure that the promise is "consistent with open source licensing, namely the GPL". Doesn't matter. As far as I can tell, the language above at least suffices for GPLv2: someone who relies on the promise also relies on that promise being available to all downstream parties."available to all downstream parties" seems the key issue. Even for people using free software licenses that don't enforce this (how else are you going to make sure your end-users can actually freely use, study, improve, share and redistribute your work). The GPL is special in that it tries to legally enforce that "the chain cannot be broken". I hope your reasoning is indeed correct and that this statement can be seen as an irrevocable legally binding promise on Microsoft. Maybe I am too much of a cynic. In the past Microsoft seems to have used ambiguity to not make any meaningful promise. But you are right that just taking the literal wording of the second FAQ entry seems pretty explicit. I would still feel better if they didn't preface it with the claim that they "can't give anyone a legal opinion about how our language relates to the GPL". If they could remove that earlier (confusing) FAQ entry that would be great.
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