Final Draft of GPLv3 Allows Novell-Microsoft Deal

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.'"

TiVo

[danbert8]

So does that mean TiVo can continue to sell their products because their deal was made before GPL3 was drafted?

P:rotection from MSFT patent suits

[morgan_greywolf]

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?

Fale

[Wiseman1024]

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 stuff with my own license that will address these issues, and I encourage others to do likewise. And, for the things where GPL will suffice, I'll stay with GPLv2, because GPLv3 is just not worth it.

Is the GPLV3 REALLY That Important?

[tjstork]

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. If people want to see the source code for my thing, they can always come to my web site. The odds of someone making a closed source product out of my code are probably rarer than the odds of me getting rich writing shareware for Windows, so what difference does it really make?

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