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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."

1 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Re:trying to care... by bmo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "I never really found a use for SUSE before, still haven't now. I use Gentoo. About as far off that I'll go is Fedora, and even then it's only for work. That RMS approves of it, or that it fits with GPLv3 doesn't really matter. RMS doesn't use SUSE. Why does he care?"

    Because there are programmers at Novell that write stuff that winds up in _all_ distributions. Don't forget that Novell has the Mono and Ximian crew. Other distributions using Mono and Ximian software are downstream from Novell (such as Gentoo). Since Microsoft is saying "we won't sue you or your customers, but we're thinking about suing other people" tells everyone else that maybe they're tainted because they've got code that Novell employees wrote for Gnome and Mono. Whether that matters or not remains to be seen, but the chair throwing howler monkey that is Steve Ballmer has everyone involved with this stuff looking askance, to say the least.

    So just because you're not a SuSE user doesn't mean that you're unaffected.

    "0 right to use as you see fit
    1 right to share
    2 right to modify
    3 right to share modifications"

    You forgot

    4. Right to restrict downstream users/programmers rights, which the downstream doesn't participate in 0 through 3.

    Suppose I make AnAwesomeProgram and distribute it freely under the BSD license, thus releasing it to the world uninhibited. SomeoneElse comes along, takes the code he didn't write, adds some trivial functionality, and resells for $$$$, but doesn't allow his customers the same rights he had (thou shalt not reverse engineer, thou shalt not decompile, thou shalt not redistribute, thou shalt worship only me and live).

    To me, that would be unacceptable.

    In a perfect world, the BSD license would be ideal, but the world is neither perfect and not all people have good intentions, imo. That's why there's the GPL. The world is also full of choices, which is why there's more than just the GPL.

    --
    BMO