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Stallman Absolves Novell

Posted by kdawson on from the what-he-said dept.

A few days ago we linked the transcript of Richard Stallman's talk at the Tokyo GPLv3 meeting . Now bubulubugoth writes to point us to an analysis of what Stallman said in Tokyo. In particular, these quotes: "Microsoft has not given Novell a patent license, and thus, section 7 of the GPL version 2 does not come into play. Instead, Microsoft offered a patent license that is rather limited to Novell's customers alone." And, apparently resolving the conundrum of whether GPLv2 and GPLv3 licenses can be commingled: "There's no difficulty in having some programs in the system under GPL2 and other programs under GPL3."

6 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Shame on you Slashdot.. by QuantumG · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Doesn't seem logical but Novell won't discuss it preferring, it says, to wait and see what happens in the GPL3 negotiations, clinging to the notion that Stallman and company - anarchist fanatics said to be cut from the same all-or-nothing cloth as suicide bombers - won't do anything to derail Linux. Quite apart from the partial title, which is misrepresentative of the article, why would you post a link to anything that contained statements like this?

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    How we know is more important than what we know.
    1. Re:Shame on you Slashdot.. by bmo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Quite apart from the partial title, which is misrepresentative of the article, why would you post a link to anything that contained statements like this?"

      Because I guess that the editors know nothing about sys-con. I had sys-con blackholed for a while and last time I cleaned my hosts file, I took them out. Looks like they're up to their same old BS. Sys-Con (system of a con) is a troll organization and most of what I have ever read WRT their attitude toward Linux and the GPL in general has been inaccurate and just plain nonsense. There was _no_ "absolution" of Novell. There was a "It's a good thing they did this now, so we can disallow it in V3." Even the title of the article is a troll. They publish articles "for the clicks and the lulz" like Dan "Lyin'" Lyons and Rob "I'll give a keynote speech for SCO World drunk" Enderle. How articles like that wind up on Slashdot? The editors don't do the least amount of due-diligence - not even a cursory reading of the articles themselves, apparently.

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      BMO

  2. irresponsible journalism by idlake · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Doesn't seem logical but Novell won't discuss it preferring, it says, to wait and see what happens in the GPL3 negotiations, clinging to the notion that Stallman and company - anarchist fanatics said to be cut from the same all-or-nothing cloth as suicide bombers - won't do anything to derail Linux.

    This statement is ambiguous; is it saying that Novell made these statements about Stallman, or is it the journalist's own statement?

    Either way, likening someone who takes a principled stand on intellectual property to "suicide bombers" is highly irresponsible. By the same reasoning, you might liken the Founding Fathers, Microsoft Management, or the US Supreme Court to "anarchist fanatics ... suicide bombers".

    This sort of shitty journalism shouldn't be rewarded with ad impressions.

  3. Re:Comingling by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Of course they can be compiled together.
    Distributing that executable to the public is where the problems start...

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    liqbase :: faster than paper
  4. What's the big deal with forking? by bl8n8r · · Score: 4, Insightful

    FTFA: ".. will create a schism in the open source community and fork Linux."

    What's the big problem with a fork? So you have Microvell Linux and the real Linux.

    Microvell Lizard Linux is going to be a pregnant toad injected full of politics, DRM and Microsoft IP. Microsoft will have the option that way of killing it then with litigation, or letting it stick around to sell to Windows people that think they are smart switching to (MLL) Linux.

    The real Linux will still be around, minus whatever Microsoft pays the courts to tell everyone they can't use anymore. The inevitability of all this is approaching like a garbage truck, so what is the problem with forking? M$ has been preparing for this for a long time buying up patents and everything else. Beginning over with a forked code base may be the only alternative. Either that, or put all your computer gear in front of the garbage truck and let it have it's way.

    Novell, we smell poniez: http://techp.org/

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  5. Re:trying to care... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That's fine, but what do you mean by "available"?

    It is the GPL license of Linux that has forced companies like IBM, Intel, Sun, SGI, etc. to contribute valuable codes like enterprise-level schedulers and >128-way SMP support, RCU, great compiler optimizations, etc. Linux people aren't smarter than BSD (I'd even say it's the opposite), but GPL helps them to use the market forces to their advantage.

    My guess would be that the only reason you share your code is because you have no business interest in it, so from your point-of-view it is commercially worthless. In contrast, GPL is both encouraging and forcing people to share even software that is of central commercial interest to them.