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."

Comments

Re:expiry its

[QuantumG]

or stop using the term "editors".

Re:Great,

[QuantumG]

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.

Good news for Digg

[mrsam]

From TFA:

[ A spokesman for a Microsoft-funded trade group ] disputed the assertion that Microsoft's distribution of Suse Linux service and support coupons makes it a Linux distributor.

"They're not distributing Linux," Wilder said. "They're providing somebody access to a service but they're not providing copies of Linux on a disk, and they're not providing somebody access to Linux for the purpose of download, and so they're not engaged in any distribution."

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.

Re:Great,

[notamisfit]

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.

It's very simple for Microsoft

[harlows_monkeys]

It's very simple for Microsoft to deal with this. Let's say Linux goes GPLv3, and SuSE is on 10.7 by then, which is the last GPLv2 version. SuSE 10.8 is GPLv3.

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.