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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."
Google says 11,000 people also misspelt Expirey.
Why doesn't anyone at least proofread the title? What's "expirey" anyway?
But could they only apply to GPL v2 software? Does anyone know the wording of one of these cupons?
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
When I was a wee lad of 5 or 6, my grandpa would sit me on his lap and tell me about life and learning. He'd say things like "Boy, always treat people as you'd like them to treat you" or "A penny saved is a penny earned".
My favourite one was "Boy, never, ever misspell the word "expiry" or you'll look like a fucking retard."
I sure miss Grandpa.
Trolling is a art,
Linus says "You know what, GPL3 is where I like it, so 2.8 is going to be it"
Heck, what about GNU? Can't have linux without GCC or the lib. Unless Novel wants to fully fork their distro, they don't have much of a choice. Someone is going to use GPL3.
The vouchers can be exchanged for Suse Linux which currently uses GPLv2. When the linux kernel switches to GPLv3 they will have to release newer versions of Suse with GPLv3 (or fork off the current GPLv2 licensed tree and be stuck with an old kernel). If a single person exchanges a voucher after Suse switches to GPLv3, everyone gets protection. The MS voucher cant change the license that Suse comes with. Its possible the vouchers specify which version of Suse they can be exchanged for but this appears to not be the case.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
How we know is more important than what we know.
or stop using the term "editors".
How we know is more important than what we know.
Maybe they have a 49 char max, but I could be wro
In the future Microsoft will either have to trade in those coupons for software (which will be licensed to them under the GPLv3) or they will have to dump them in a sewer drain and forget about them. The article says what it will mean if Microsoft trades them in.
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.
you're missing the point.
MS (effectively) bought a bunch of coupons for SuSE. MS is who will be handing out those coupons.
So either MS just shrugs its shoulders, and counts the money they paid to Novell as a loss (meaning - they don't give away the coupons), or they somehow give away all the coupons before anything in SuSE uses GPL3 (which is the only way what you're saying would matter), or..., and the point of the GP, MS uses the coupons realistically, and by so doing sanctions the GPL3 as it is Microsoft giving out the coupons, not Novell.
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.
Coupons for a product are like gift cards. You turn the coupon in to Novell, and Novell gives you the copy of Suse, Microsoft is not involved in the distribution of anything other than the coupon.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
If MS are giving away coupons for a version of SUSE, what the hell is stopping them from giving away the disk version from the day they made their coupons?
You mean try to push it as bits in a box like Vista or XP with a five year "cycle" time?
They could do that, but no one will buy them and that will hurt M$. Who wants to pay for a year old version of free software? Sure, it works but you can just download one that works better. The terms of the deal were that Novel would pay a percentage or a minimum of $40 million. Looks like the minimum is going to be what they get, so they will be down about $120 million. That's the cost of FUD, I suppose.
Another BIG problem with your scenerio is that they may have to cut out all software licensed under GPL 2 or later. It's the user or author that gets to decide the GPL version, not the vendor. In that case they will have to just throw the coupons away.
This is a fine ending for M$'s attempt to charge licensing frees for free software like they own it. They can own it, so long as they abide by the terms of the GPL, like IBM and everyone else. It's M$'s steadfast refusal to co-operate that keeps them out of the free software party. They can't just get along and compete like everyone else, they have to own everything and squeeze every nickel out of every user. It's not going to work any more than their in house software can compete in a free market. At the very best, they will get a old, modified and incomplete version while everyone else enjoys the latest and greatest.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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!
So, if understand correctly this part of Groklaw discussion
As you can see in the section I highlighted, the minute someone turns in a voucher after GPLv3 is in effect, Microsoft will be granting a patent license to everyone, not just Novell's paying customers:
protection against MS-expected-patent-infringement will be available only if kernel is released under GPLv3. Linus does not seem to be very much inclined towards GPLv3 the last I read about it. Am I missing anything here?
Will it lead to some people seeing GPLv3 in different light?
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.
My expirey-sense is tingling!
The GPL does not contain this clause. What you're referring to is this (from the GPL HOWTO):
This is not a part of the license: it is just the text that most people use to apply the GPL to their code. Many people, however, including the distributors of the Linux kernel, do not include the "any later version" clause. The reasons for this are many and varied, but in the end it generally comes down to not wanting any organization, including the FSF, to be able to re-write the license for your code on the fly. If you include the "any later version" clause, and the GPL is changed to read like the BSD license, or the Apache license, you're out of luck. If, however, you leave out that clause, it is at the author's discretion as to whether or not a new version of the GPL should be applied.
Thomas Galvin
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
- Microsoft engaged in a contract with Novell, MS distributes coupons for Novell software, Novell gets a liscense granting freedom from MS patent concerns. Money traded hand.
- FSF and others went WTF Novell - you can't do that, you're distributing under the GPL, that code is GPLed, WTF are you doing.
- Novell found a nice big loophole in the GPL and ran through it with a truckload of MS cash.
- FSF is releasing GPL 3.0 which closes the loophole
- It is assumed that when GPL 3 comes out, Novell will choose to distribute under 3, rather than forking off their own version of the kernel to retain GPL 2.0 licensing.
- The argument here is that once Novell starts distributing under 3.0 with the MS coupons (i.e. with a lisence to use the patented material from MS) the GPL 3.0 viral patent lisence clause goes into effect.
There are problems with this.. not the least of which is that it attempts to blend the GPL (copyright law) and the MS-Novell deal (Contract Law) as if they held to the same principles (which they don't contracts are shredable in a few thousand ways). MS will probably argue that this use of their limited licesne with Novell constitutes an act of bad faith.. intended to deprive them of their patent rights.. which would then go to a whole series of legal arguments that don't matter for now. Basically.. FSF thinks they're SO clever, they're letting MS know what's coming. Great idea.. no really.. suprise is useless. ]sigh[
-GiH
Actually I did look it up, but there was no entry (Random-House). As my initial guess for the choosen usage
I hate to be the one to have to say this, but maybe you'd better get a better dictionary.
The default one in Firefox (dictionary.reference.com) isn't too bad; you can get it by typing "dict {word}" into the URL field. Although honestly, Google seems to just get better and better as a spell-checker; actually it'd be pretty slick someday if spelling packages could failover to Google for suggestions, on detecting a word not in their dictionary -- that would let them stay more or less permanently up-to-date, even on neologisms. (I bet Google would consider such automated queries abusive, though.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What if the GPL were changed requiring any distributor to give ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS to the user?
Could a user legally force a developer who released software under a prior GPL version, with the future version clause included, to pay such a sum?
From Wikipedia... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract
If the terms of the contract are uncertain or incomplete, the parties cannot have reached an agreement in the eyes of the law.[19] An agreement to agree does not constitute a contract, and an inability to agree on key issues, which may include such things as price or safety, may cause the entire contract to fail. However, a court will attempt to give effect to commercial contracts where possible, by construing a reasonable construction of the contract.[20]
Courts may also look to external standards, which are either mentioned explicitly in the contract[21] or implied by common practice in a certain field.[22] In addition, the court may also imply a term; if price is excluded, the court may imply a reasonable price, with the exception of land, and second-hand goods, which are unique.
If there are uncertain or incomplete clauses in the contract, and all options in resolving its true meaning have failed, it may be possible to sever and void just those affected clauses if the contract includes a severability clause. The test of whether a clause is severable is an objective test - whether a reasonable person would see the contract standing even without the clauses.
By allowing major modification against the will of one of the parties, is the GPL "Incomplete"? Would this standard would allow a distributor to not be bound by clauses in a contract that were not even existant at the time of the contracts inception?
With the GPL's 'viral' nature, wouldn't it be a huge liability for anyone to agree to such an open ended contract?
Could arguing this case damage Open Source, by showing a possible danger of contributing anything under the GPL?
Not saying the GPL should change however it wants, however, allowing one party to an agreement to unilaterally change the terms after the fact is a bad idea. Unless you want your rent to triple, and still be bound to your lease, and you lease extended to 99 years, payable in advance.
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.
The Granny Weatherwax way : she doesn't have the vampire in her blood, the vampire has her in his blood.
Mr. Bungi, you need to realize that in the English language, there is such a thing as context. The word "own" can refer to several things, including constitutionally protected private property, intellectual authorship, and even homosexual rape.
If Linus was still staunchly for it (which all signs point to that he doesn't like it), he'd have to strip out GPLv2 code and rewrite it with GPLv3 code.
AFAIK, GPLv3 and GPLv2 code can be linked, so nothing needs to be stripped. If they can't track down the author for some old piece of code, they can just leave it under GPLv2.
So, they could probably put a large chunk of the existing code under GPLv3 plus all new code, making the kernel effectively GPLv3 in its entirety (of course, you're free to use the GPLv2 bits under the GPLv2).
at least it makes the whole thing almost as exciting as the pirates v ninjas posts on the treasure ship story and it reminds me of this helpful explanation of the offside rule: (citizens of countries where football is called soccer should stop reading at this point.) http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2006/offside-4- girls-p1.php
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
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!
Anyone with half a brain already knows that Fry's will never have anything to do with whatever wording is written in the box or inside the box. From a retail store (legal) perspective, it's just a box with someone else's product inside.
What's next? Nerds writing "if you distribute this product you're allowing me to buy anything for free" inside their submissions, so they can get free stuff at Fry's?
Even the patent clause, it's weaker than most EULAs. In fact, stuff needs to have little strenght at all to be weak, so that makes the patent clause null instead of just weak. Expecting a judge to drop patent litigation rights because of product distribution is beyond stupid.
Emacs 22 is vaporware
Not so much: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/06/shiny-and- new-emacs-22.html
yp.
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).