Royalty free patent peace for GPL software from Microsoft? [LWN.net]

Royalty free patent peace for GPL software from Microsoft?

Posted Aug 4, 2008 10:56 UTC (Mon) by mjw (subscriber, #16740)
In reply to: Royalty free patent peace for GPL software from Microsoft? by JoeBuck
Parent article: Bruce Perens: Microsoft and Apache - What's the Angle? (IT Management)

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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