GPL update targets Microsoft-Novell deal

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 29 March 2007 05:08

Business IT - Technology

The third discussion draft of the GNU General Public Licence version 3 (GPLv3) addresses last year's deal between Microsoft and Novell, in which Microsoft promised not to sue Novell customers for using its intellectual property.

"The unforeseen agreement between Microsoft Corporation and Novell, Inc., announced in November, presents grave threats to users of free software. It was necessary for us to take the time carefully to develop mechanisms in GPLv3 that would deter agreements of this sort and provide strong defenses against their accompanying dangers", says the foreword to the GPLv3 Rationale.

Such discriminatory patent agreements are dealt with by GPLv3 extending them to all recipients of the affected program(s), and by terminating GPL permissions for a distributor that obtains a discriminatory patent promise in return for payment to a third party that is also in the software distribution business.

This will seem alien to companies used to gaining commercial advantage through patents, but that is not the purpose of the GPL. Instead, it is intended to protect the 'four freedoms' articulated by Richard Stallman: the freedom to run a program, to copy and distribute it, to modify its source code, and to distribute modified versions.

Novell's initial response (through its Open PR blog) was that "Nothing in this new draft of GPL3 inhibits Novell’s ability to include GPL3 technologies in SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, and other Novell open source offerings, now and in the future."

"If the final version of the GPL3 does potentially impact the agreement we have with Microsoft, we’ll address that with Microsoft."

Find out more about the provisions of GPLv3 on page 2.