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Final Draft of GPLv3 Allows Novell-Microsoft Deal

Posted by Zonk on Fri Jun 22, 2007 07:47 AM
from the and-we-all-go-forward-singing-together dept.
Software Novell Linux
famicommie writes "All of Novell's fingernail biting has been for naught. In a display of forgiveness and bridge building on behalf of the FSF, ZDNet reports that the final draft of the GPLv3 will close the infamous MS-Novell loophole while allowing deals made previously to continue. From the article: 'The final, last-call GPLv3 draft bans only future deals for what it described as tactical reasons in a 32-page explanation of changes. That means Novell doesn't have to worry about distributing software in SLES that's governed by the GPLv3 ... Drafting the new license has been a fractious process, but Eben Moglen, the Columbia University law school professor who has led much of the effort, believes consensus is forming. That agreement is particularly important in the open-source realm, where differing license requirements can erect barriers between different open-source projects.'"
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[+] Novell Worries About GPL v3 157 comments
An anonymous reader writes "In its annual report for the fiscal year ended October 31, 2006, Novell expressed concerns over how the new version of the GPL may affect their business. Microsoft might stop distributing Suse coupons if the GPL version 3 interferes with their agreement or puts Microsoft's patents at risk, ultimately causing Novell's business and operating results to be adversely affected."
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Final Draft of GPLv3 Allows Novell-Microsoft Deal 50 Comments More /

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  • TiVo (Score:3, Interesting)

    by danbert8 (1024253) on Friday June 22 2007, @07:51AM (#19606901)
    So does that mean TiVo can continue to sell their products because their deal was made before GPL3 was drafted?

    • Re:TiVo (Score:5, Informative)

      by MadTinfoilHatter (940931) on Friday June 22 2007, @08:05AM (#19607029)

      So does that mean TiVo can continue to sell their products because their deal was made before GPL3 was drafted?
      The patent-deal issue, and the Tivoization issue are completely different topics. Furthermore TiVo can continue to sell their products for as long as they like, as long as they use GPLv2-licenced software - and the stuff that's already GPLv2 won't magically become v3 just because a new version is released. Only future releases will be affected for those projects that decide to go v3.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by SnowZero (92219)
      TiVo should be fine unless the Linux kernel is relicensed, which is not going to happen any time soon, if ever. Even then, they could always just fork off at the last GPL2 kernel release, as its not like they desperately need most updates (are they even on 2.6 yet?). Any other libraries/interfaces they use outside of the kernel should be LGPL or MIT/BSD, so they should be fine unless some critical program/daemon they need to run becomes GPL3 only. I guess if that happens its time to adopt a BSD userspace
  • Eben Moglen's (and FSF's) stance on this issue seems to be that the language of GPLV3 will automatically cause all GPLV3 software distributed by Novell in SLES to be protected by the Microsoft-Novell deal. Now, IANAL, but Eben Moglen is. I'm not sure he's 100% right, but I'm also not sure he's 100% wrong either. I wonder if that would hold up in court?
    • There is the court of law, and the "court of public opinion". One data point, and you can argue the significance, is the number of reputable kernel hackers who've dropped Novell like a cheating sweetheart.
      For all the sound and fury about GPLv3, I submit that it's really all good. Some strong ideas were expressed by the FSF, feedback came, and the wording was polished such that the final product may prove acceptable over time.
      A gold star, a group hug, and a round of Koom Ba Ya for all my friends.

  • Old news (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cato (8296) on Friday June 22 2007, @07:55AM (#19606933)
    This story is from 4th June... Another great bit of Slashdot editing.

  • not binding--some projects will probably strike it (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nanosquid (1074949) on Friday June 22 2007, @07:56AM (#19606939)
    This affects "GPLv2 or later" projects that can't be relicensed because some of the contributors can't be reached.

    For new projects, or if all the developers agree, or for new contributions to existing projects, you can strike the clause permitting earlier deals if you like.

  • Divide and Conquer (Score:4, Insightful)

    by davermont (1001265) on Friday June 22 2007, @07:57AM (#19606949)
    Good. Despite my displeasure with the MS/Novell deal, I think it's best not to create in-fighting within a community that has worked so hard to get where it is in the market. Divide and conquer is an old trick.
    • One could also call it pruning of the old branches though.
    • yes, it's probably a good move since otherwise, Novell, and the other losers who signed up with Microsoft, would only have been forced to fork their distro packages as they moved to GPLv3. That would have been bad and could very well been one of the expected results Microsoft wanted. They don't want licensing fees, they want Linux out of the picture and splitting the market with truckloads of forks would have soured businesses on Linux and OSS.

      So good move by the FSF and I find it comforting that 'the coun

  • Kudos ! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by unity100 (970058) on Friday June 22 2007, @07:59AM (#19606965) Homepage Journal
    All these stuff about free software, people acting together and stuff, are, despite the turmoil and bickering, maybe because everything moves forward in spite of the turmoil and bickering, filling me with much hope.

  • Foolish (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ThePolkapunk (826529) on Friday June 22 2007, @08:00AM (#19606971) Homepage
    This seems a bit foolish to me. By not locking out the MS-Novell and other deals, it's as if they're being rewarded for weakning open source.

    • Re:Foolish (Score:4, Informative)

      by Chandon Seldon (43083) on Friday June 22 2007, @08:31AM (#19607287) Homepage

      It's actually an evil scheme on the part of the FSF to get Microsoft to distribute GPLv3 software, thus taking away their ability to make patent threats. Further, the Novell-Microsoft deal looks to be mostly harmful in practice - that sort of deal is horribly problematic in theory, but in this particular case it's worth more to the community to yell "Bad Dog" really loud rather than to sucker punch them.

    • Except open source is not weaker; if you think it is because of the deal, I'd like to see some evidence. What are the facts?

      * Novell and SUSE has been consistently one of the biggest contributors to free and open source software and still is. While probably your distro X is packaging Linux software (a truly wonderful thing), let's not forget that Novell are the ones ensuring that developers can work on this free software. Countless developers to work and improve KDE, GNOME, the Linux Kernel, OpenOffice,

      • While probably your distro X is packaging Linux software (a truly wonderful thing), let's not forget that Novell are the ones ensuring that developers can work on this free software.

        My distro is Red Hat. Anything else that you have to say? ;)

        • > My distro is Red Hat. Anything else that you have to say? ;)

          Nothing except I love RedHat, the developers there, and what they've done and keep doing for free and open source software. That doesn't mean I need to ignore SUSE/Novell's huge contributions as well. :)
  • It sounds like the process has been compromised. Since the FSF will release future versions of all their stuff under GPLv3, why allow the MS/Novell deal to use the newer code? Perhaps they're worried that those companies actually have the resources to maintain a GPLv2 fork that could come to dominance over their own? Maybe killing SUSE isn't a good idea? What's the tactical reason?

    I've also been reading Linus comments on Tivoisation, and I agree with him in principle. However, I see the potential threat th

    • Re:Compromised (Score:4, Informative)

      by Chandon Seldon (43083) on Friday June 22 2007, @08:35AM (#19607323) Homepage

      What's the tactical reason?

      Tactics are exactly the answer here - the FSF has a history of making tactical compromises. The FSF's process has no more been compromised over this than it was when they decided to release the LGPL and license GNU libc under it.

      • gr8_phk wrote:

        What's the tactical reason?

        And somehow Chandon Seldon got a +3, Informative for:

        Tactics are exactly the answer here - the FSF has a history of making tactical compromises. The FSF's process has no more been compromised over this than it was when they decided to release the LGPL and license GNU libc under it.

        Personally, as an outsider on this particular issue; I am no closer to an answer to gr8_phk's question. What exactly is informative about answering "What's the tactical reason" with "The tactics"?

        Can anyone provide an actual answer?

        Thanks,
        ~Rebecca

        • And somehow Chandon Seldon got a +3, Informative for:

          It's only a +2 informative. I get an awesome karma bonus. =P

          Can anyone provide an actual answer?

          Three main reasons:

          1. Although agreements like the Novel / Microsoft deal are extremely dangerous, this specific agreement isn't that big a threat. Microsoft's empty threats aren't forcing everyone to license SuSE in order to use the GNU/Linux system.
          2. By allowing Novel and Microsoft to distribute GPLv3 software, the FSF hopes that Microsoft will end up distri
          • Thanks, That helps, hopefully someone will mod you up on this one.

            On the "being pedantic" sidenote; I have karma bonus disabled, but you start at a base of 1, not zero. So the 2 positive mods you got give 2+1=3, it'd have been +4 with your bonus. But in either case, thanks for the answer :)

            ~Rebecca
  • Does anyone know whether RMS has backed down on this? Or has he simply flip-flopped like politicians?

    • Does anyone know whether RMS has backed down on this? Or has he simply flip-flopped like politicians?

      RMS is a pragmatic idealist, not a blind one. He is and always has been willing to "back down" on issues where that will, from what he sees, serve his ideals better in the long term.

    • Strategically, RMS has never wavered. However, he's very good at recognizing when tactical changes (which I believe this to be) are appropriate to achieving his strategic goal (which remains unchanged).

      In the grand scheme of things, I don't think it matters one way or another whether the grandfather clause remains part of GPL3 or not. If RMS sees it the same way, then by allowing it, it disallows similar agreements in the future, but appears merciful to those who previously made agreements in "good faith" (

  • Fale (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Wiseman1024 (993899)
    Seriously, every day I'm more and more unhappy with the GPLv3. We have four big problems, which are digital restrictions management, patents, tivoization, and trap deals. The GPLv3 was about preventing these problems from happening, or at least, from affecting us. Yet right now it barely solves one of them. With every new revision, the GPLv3 got more and more fagged up, to the point it's now a stupid overhyped version of GPLv2 with little to no improvement, a pointless license.

    Now I'll consider relesing my
    • Could you please explain how you think GPL3 fails in the four goals? I don't see it.

      DRM: GPL3 code is explicitly not covered by DMCA and therefore is legal to circumvent.

      patents: already implicitly included in GPL2, now explicitly included in GPL3.

      tivoization: did they remove this requirement?

      trap deals: forbids new deals, but grandfathers in old deals that might have been made in "good faith". Always a good idea to avoid making people "criminals" after the fact.
    • Well, it appears that GPLv3 still addresses DRM by noting (legally of course) that the software licensed by it is not an "effective control mechanism" or anything like that, so if it does include DRM, it is explicitly allowed to remove said DRM system regardless of what the law (DMCA, EUCD, etc.) say.

      Patents still seem to be almost fine; it even has compatibility with the Apache License v2, so that's pretty important. I heard that they were allowing the MS/Novell deal because as soon as Novell distributes
      • Imagine Suse, Xandros and Linspire using fundamental OS tools incompatible with the rest of the desktop world.

        Why would that be so bad? Solaris and *BSD have their own user space tools and they work just fine.
  • I've two open source projects that I'm working on, and both are either going to be released GPLv2 or maybe even BSD. I might even contemplate, gasp, Public Domain. Once you make the mental leap that you are going to be giving your software away, then, what difference does it make how you do so? I really don't want to spend too much time worrying that someone might make money with my stuff when I know that I won't.

    The GPL is sorta irrelevant in a way. Any more, open source can mean any number of licenses
    • I really don't want to spend too much time worrying that someone might make money with my stuff when I know that I won't.

      Great, use the BSD licence, it will be perfect as a non-copyleft free software licence, which is what you're aiming for.

      The GPL is sorta irrelevant in a way

      For you, maybe. But you're assuming that everyone also "doesn't worry" in the way you do, and you are discounting the fact that other - apparently a large number - people have other reasons to use a copyleft licence such as th

    • Once you make the mental leap that you are going to be giving your software away, then, what difference does it make how you do so? I really don't want to spend too much time worrying that someone might make money with my stuff when I know that I won't.

      The the appropriate license for your projects is BSD or public domain, but that doesn't necessarily mean that others have the same perspective. Is it so hard to imagine that others would want to ensure their code and modifications to it remain open? That's what the GPL is for: ensuring that is getting more complicated as the older defitions of using code and distributing code and modifying code are getting blurrier, so a new revision of the GPL is going to clarify some of that.

      I haven't made my mind up on the v3 stuff yet, but I'm a GPL supported more than a BSD supporter. But I can still understand why someone would want to follow the "more free" BSD policies for simplicity's sake to avoid a lot of the legal wranglings and to encourage more ubiquitous acceptance of the code into more markets/uses.

      -N

    • I really don't want to spend too much time worrying that someone might make money with my stuff when I know that I won't.

      It's not about making money. There's plenty of examples of companies making money off GPL code that they didn't originate (or write). The difference between the choices you've noted are the requirements and ownership of the code. GPL requires in-turn contribution of changes made and maintains copyright to the author. BSD requires credit and retains copyright. The public domain is s

    • I just don't see the need for this license at all.

      There exists a multitude of licensing options because all this finite detail about exactly how and why and when and where you can use free software does matter to a lot of people. There are a good number of die-hard BSDers that believe that "as long as I get credit, do as you like". For many, more restrictions are important to them. For them GPL, Apache, or one of the other 53 OSI approved licenses exists so you can pin down exactly what rights you wish to maintain. It's not necessarily about whether

    • Look at it from a business standpoint. If I add a feature I need to a BSD-licensed project, for example, and contribute the code back so someone else can maintain and extend it and keep it integrated with new versions (so I don't have to keep updating and applying my own patches as new versions get released). Now a competitor can come along, extend my feature a bit, use that in their own product and never let me have access to their extension. But if I did the same with a GPL-licensed project, then although

  • summary is wrong (Score:4, Informative)

    by DJProtoss (589443) on Friday June 22 2007, @08:31AM (#19607293)
    The text the article is referring to is unchanged since the earlier drafts, and it certainly doesn't get novell off the hook wrt the linked article - Microsoft may still well have to lean on them to stop them shipping gplv3 code - since the use of the coupons, whilst existing as an effect of the patent agreement, will cause, when useed, a new contract between the coupon issuer [microsoft and novell] and the redeemer [joe bloggs] to be created at the date of redemption. If the code joe bloggs recieves contains gpl3'd code, then under the current draft (and as indicated in tfa) any patent protection indemities offered by that contract will automatically be extended to everybody. Thats why there was the fuss after poeple noted there isn't an expiry date on the coupons - up till that point it was thought they would all be gone by the time gplv3 was out and suse would be fine. Conclusion: either the summariser is misinformed or a turfer. for further info, go have a browse through groklaw [groklaw.net]. They have had pretty good coverage of it.

  • Doesn't exempt, though (Score:5, Informative)

    by Todd Knarr (15451) on Friday June 22 2007, @08:42AM (#19607415) Homepage

    All the GPLv3 language does is make merely having entered into the deal not per se a violation of the license. It does not exempt the company from any of the other terms of the license, including the requirement that all recipients receive not merely the protections resulting from any agreement but the right to pass along those protections in turn. So Novell is still on the hook there: as soon as they're faced with GPLv3'd software in their distribution they'll have to decide whether or not they can extend the agreement with Microsoft to cover all Linux users, not just those who got their software directly from Novell. If they can't, then distribution subject to the agreement would still be a violation of the GPLv3 even with the grandfather clause in there.

    • I hope your interpretation here is the right one, because this is the way I think things SHOULD be. I cant ever sort out legal mumbo jumbo for myself, though...
  • " In a display of forgiveness and bridge building..."

    What are you willing to bet that it would read quite like that if it were Microsoft displaying the forgiveness?
    • Correction: Copyright law tells people that they are not allowed to do certain things. The GPL is a license that guarantees people certain additional freedoms, on condition that they agree that everyone else gets those freedoms too. It's not that hard to understand why it is called a "Free Software License."

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by fsmunoz (267297)
          From the BSD licence:

          * * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
          * * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in thedocumentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

          So, you must retain and must reproduce. Since you MUST do something, it isn't free, following the same logic.

          • Well duh, that's obvious to anyone who can read. Your point was?

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by stinerman (812158)
              You're either ignorant or trolling.

              The GPL tells you nothing about what you have to do with your code. The GPL tells you what you have to do with other people's code. In fact, BSD-style licenses are the same way.

              The GPL and BSD license are both distribution licenses. If you own the copyright on your code, you can distribute it however you like. You can GPL it, then close the source later, relicense, dual licence ... actually whatever the fuck you want. The GPL exists so that other people can distribute
        • Yes, the GPL forbids you from taking rights from others. Is a license that allows you to take rights from others more free? For whom?

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by TheCoelacanth (1069408)
          You're forbidden to use copyrighted code in any application.
        • This isn't actually true.

          What you must do is release all your source code, IFF you elect to invoke the GPL as the instrument by which you are allowed to disseminate your program to others. No such invocation, no such obligation.

          Of course, if you elect to disseminate your program to others, you may wish to verify that it is not an unlicensed derivative work belonging to someone else. If it is, you may find yourself at the nasty end of a lawsuit, ... or (mostly theoretically) a criminal investigation.

          C//

    • free licence ehh? and it forbids people from doing stuff? and tells them they MUST do other stuff?


      You've confused "freedom" with "anarchy".

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