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Microsoft's SUSE Coupons Have No Expiry Date
mw13068 writes "In a recent article in the Seattle Post Intelligencer FSF General Council Eben Moglen points out that the Microsoft SUSE coupons have no expiration date. The result? 'Microsoft can be sure that some coupons will be turned into Novell in return for software after the effective date of GPL 3. Once that has happened, patent defenses will, under the license, have moved out into the broad community and be available to anybody who Microsoft should ever sue for infringement.' Groklaw is also covering the story in it's inimitable way."
If Novell so chooses to only distribute software under GPLv2, they are certainly welcome to do so. The downside is that they will be stuck maintaining the GPLv2 versions of GCC, GDB, binutils, etc. All GNU software will be GPLv3 as soon as the license is finalized. In effect, Novell would have to fork all of the GNU tools or find a suitable replacement for them under a more permissive license. They'll need to reinvent the wheel each time an advance is made in the GPLv3 line for their old toolchain.
or stop using the term "editors".
How we know is more important than what we know.
You do know that the new versions of GNU and many other projects will be GPLv3 only right?
If Novell chooses to distribute only old forks, good luck to them, they're dead in the water already.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"Expiry" and "it's" were two of the grammar errors, but there is a third. The phrase should not be "some coupons will be turned into Novell in return for software". Instead, it should be "turned in to Novell".
It's hard to give a formal justification for this (it's not a grammar rule taught in school, but it is nevertheless followed in real-world writing), but the best I can explain it is that "turned in" is one underlying structure in the sentence and "to Novell" is another. So uniting the "in" from one structure and the "to" from the other implies a tie between the two structures that does not exist. And that makes it unclear and confusing.
Or to put it more simply, "turned into Novell" makes it sound like the coupons are becoming the company.
From TFA:
Great news! Let's start all posting the AACS key to Digg, again. After all, you won't be distributing AACS yourself, and you are not going to provide access to download anything.
Okay, this sounds like bullshit. I have two main points to make and I'd like to get an answer to these reservations.
I don't think that these coupons would be effected by the change over to GPL3. I'm betting they're a not too hard legal fight away, tops, from legally declaring that these coupons were released for a particular legal/business situation and making them not count for GPL3 versions of the product.
And even if this all goes down the way groklaw says it will, I don't believe you could mount an effective legal challenge against Microsoft when they invalidate all the vouchers and offer either a refund or a product of equal monetary value.
I also kind of get the feeling that if these guys waited they coulda sprung this on Microsoft at the first legal challenge they offered and totally took the advantage or at lest made a nice high profile case with more amusing geeky stories following it up. Now, I think the Microsoft legal beagles will shut this down before it comes to anything.
It happens.
And this long long speach comes to one point... That-- OOOO! QUARTER!
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version. Guess who's option it is.
How we know is more important than what we know.
As I've stated before, I really don't see what the downside here is. GCC just did a huge update, but GCC5 is a long time a-comin', glibc's rock steady, most of the toolchain stuff is stable and has been for the last five to ten years, Emacs 22 is vaporware, and I think we'd all prefer if Bash didn't update anymore. The Novell-MS deal is valid for five years, and Novell can do that standing on their heads with what they've got. The stuff users actually use might be a different area, but KDE's ultimately going to go the way Qt goes (haven't heard anything), and Novell's got enough pull in GNOME's development and/or the technical expertise to maintain a separate desktop if the pull doesn't go their way.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
it's complicated dude.
Microsoft can't sue anyone cause they are violating patents themselves. If they sue some random open source developer, IBM through a couple of patent pooling organisations will step in and sue Microsoft. This is the whole mutually assured destruction thing.
So no-one really cares about Microsoft suing them.. except, ya know, a few fortune 500 companies who are afraid of what any announcement of a lawsuit will do to their stock. The problem is, these idiots are quite happy to fork Microsoft a few dollars for an assurance that they won't be sued. This means Microsoft feels bolder to pretend they are going to sue, which means they get more licenses, etc.
How we know is more important than what we know.
IAJALS*, but contracts are always subject to interpretation as to meaning and intent. There are rules (which are silly, generally) limiting what can and cannot be brought in as evidence of intent - but terms like "advantadge of the bargain" and "intent of the parties" weigh heavily on judges minds when they look on contracts like this. One of the big principles of law is that there is no such thing as "magic words" in law that force parties to subject themselves to unfair (technically "inequitable") results. -actually, property law is an exception to that.. deeds are very formulaic under most state systems, but that's just real estate, which is not touched here-
Here MS has granted a limited liscense.. there is ample evidence as to intent at the time of the contract formation (many press releases from all concerned parties) and then this defense is practially a template for how to show bad faith on the part of a contracting partner. As discussed above, Novell has little / no option except to distribute under the 3.0 GPL, but doing so subjects their partner to very harsh terms which are explicity intended to fuck them over. That is a text-book worthy demonstration of abusive languge in a contract.
I'm not saying the FSF folks don't know what they're doing - they're very clever and this is sharp stuff - but this is no one sided tidal wave bearing down on MS, and they do have their own lawyers (as you may have heard), who are also very smart (and they drink the blood of virgins.. so bonus evil points).
-GiH
* = I am just a law student
You get one of the coupons. You wait a couple years, and by then the current SuSE is 11.2.
You turn in your coupon.
And guess what? Microsoft or Novell or whoever handles fulfilling the coupons sends you a bright new shiny copy of SuSE 10.7.
No expiry date? I should hope not!
It's bad enough when gift vouchers have an expiry date. The way I see it, when I buy someone a gift voucher from a store, I am lending the store money; and by slipping the gift voucher inside a birthday card, I am transferring the debt to a third party. It's not fair for the store to dictate that they will refuse to honour the debt after a certain date.
What's worse, I bet if I took out one of the same store's payment cards (not sure why I'd want to: only valid in their own and other participating retailers' outlets, and up to twice the interest rate of a normal credit card, looks a poor value proposition to me), I bet they wouldn't like it if I said something like "If I haven't paid you back in full within 12 months, I'm not going to pay you anything at all".
Why should the store, as my debtor, be allowed to get away with imposing an expiry date on a gfit voucher? THEY OWE ME (or the recipient of the gift voucher) MONEY, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!
Disclaimer: I Am Not An Economist (But I Am Tight With Money).
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
If and only if the GPLv2 code contains the "or any later version" clause -- which most of the kernel code doesn't. For the kernel to switch to v3, either all developers need to agree to it, or the code written by the ones who don't has to be stripped out and re-implemented. Without Linus's support, switching to v3 would be impossible (because he owns so much of the code). Even with his support, it will be difficult.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Novell could just maintain their own versions based on the last release made under GPLv2.
Any flaws in this scenario? I'm by no means an expert.
Technically, no. Practically, yes.
To do this, Novell would have to build up a development staff that rivaled Microsoft's in size. They wouldn't be able to simply backport GPLv3 fixes, that'd be copyright infringement, they'd have to go the whole isolation, abstraction, filtration route and rewrite updates from scratch. For lots and lots of packages, including the compilers.
But more significantly, there's no incentive for Novell to do so. They've already got the money from Microsoft. They're (as far as we know) under no obligation to maintain a GPLv2 fork. Spending huge amounts of money to do so does nothing for Novell, so why should they even bother?
-- Alastair
Suppose I own some product and am selling it for $50 a copy. You, for reasons of your own, decided to sell vouchers for it. Why not? Go ahead. But what prevents me (having realized how great a demand is) to raise the price to, say, $1000 a copy?
You can argue that you've never intended to reimburse $1000, just $50. But so what? It's your problem. We never had a contract. Your intentions regarding something not you, but I do own were never discussed with me, the owner, let alone formalized in a contract. So your choice is either 1) respect the coupons and lose money, or 2) cancel coupons and lose business reputation.
Lesson: making deals do not forget about creators and owners of things you are trying to profit on. (Sorry for English errors if any).