Timing?

Posted Mar 2, 2009 22:13 UTC (Mon) by pjhacnau (subscriber, #4223)
Parent article: Third time is the charm?

You didn't reference the recent MS-RedHat deal, and it's explicit exclusion of any patent protection. The timing seems a bit more than coincidental to me . . .

Timing?

Posted Mar 2, 2009 22:42 UTC (Mon) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] (2 responses)

Red Hat would not accept any deal in the first place that included "patent protection"... because such presumes there exists some patent issues where protection is needed... or at least that is my understanding from their previous statements and actions...so I don't see how that is coincidental. I guess you'll have to spell it out.

Timing?

Posted Mar 2, 2009 23:41 UTC (Mon) by pjhacnau (subscriber, #4223) [Link] (1 responses)

"because such presumes there exists some patent issues where protection is needed"

How better to demonstrate the need for protection than by successfuly suing someone?

There's another reason

Posted Mar 3, 2009 1:13 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

The GPL doesn't allow Red Hat to make a deal to protect itself from patents, unless it is allowed to pass that protection downstream to anyone who obtains there code or makes changes to it.

Novell got around this by some questionable legal trickery, of a kind that GPLv3/LGPLv3 does not permit.