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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,
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 GNU part of the userland will definitely go to GPLv3, and that is as much a part of linux as the kernel.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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
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.
Five points.
/maybe/ if MS continues to distribute coupons after something critical goes GPLv3, in part because I think it likely a court will hold that the agreement was made before the license change and MS can't be held to an ex pos facto license change, and in part because it's really still up in the air whether what they are doing would legally be distribution or not -- it may not be, and no opinions posted here are likely to matter when it comes time for a court to rule on that.
/could/ change to GPLv3, regardless of what many say, /if/ most/all of the current major contributors were to agree to it. It'd be quite a long journey, several years, but if all the major contributors agreed that's a lot of code that could be switched first to GPLv2 or 3, and later to v3 only, without any rewriting at all. Given the existing rate of code turnover, within three years or so I'd say a good 2/3 to 3/4 of the code could be GPLv2/GPLv3 dual licensed with little effort at all. After another couple years of more concentrated effort, culminating in a seriously focused coding marathon much like the Bitkeeper>GIT transition (which many thought couldn't be done either, at least and keep the same productivity), the remaining code should have been rewritten, and the GPLv2 side of the dual license could be dropped.
/the/ /kernel/ the kernel will have to be GPLv3 licensed. The protection in the license can only apply to something licensed under it, so of course, it could only apply to the kernel if it's so licensed. However, as you point out, that could be a VERY good reason to switch to GPLv3, quite apart from any other reason. The way patents are going, it may be that the kernel will ultimately /have/ to switch, or lose the momentum it currently has to something else (say Sun's Solaris kernel, if they license it GPLv3 as they are making noises saying they might do). It could well be that within a few years, few businesses will risk deployment of a GPLv2 kernel due to perceived (note that word, perceived, they may or may not have been legally validated) patent issues, and the money now funding all those full time Linux kernel devs will be funding something else (Solaris development?) if the Linux kernel isn't in the process of going GPLv3 by then.
1) I'm skeptical this will force MS into anything in regard to the GPLv3, except
2) With draft-3, Linus has said he's actually quite pleased with how it turned out, now. It remains to be seen whether he'll like the legally binding final version or not, but it's looking rather better than it did. Of course, he's not going to change the license all on his own, either, but his opinion will make a big difference, and even if it didn't, if his opinion on it has changed that much, others may have as well.
3) It'd be a long process, but the kernel
The license couldn't be turned on a dime, and it WOULD take the agreement of nearly all current and former major contributors, but it COULD be changed, given a time frame of several years and sufficient motivation to do so.
4) I've not yet read the Groklaw article (I will), but the point you quote about the patent protection only applying if the kernel is GPLv3 is valid -- for the kernel, not for Novel/SuSE. IOW, for the patent protection to apply to
5) During the dual GPLv2/GPLv3 license period, and this applies to anything licensed GPLv2 or later as well, the license says at YOUR option, meaning each user/distributor can choose the version they wish. Some have claimed that such would allow users to force distributors to the v3 terms if they wished. That isn't so, and the FSF doesn't hold it to be so either. It simply means that anyone downstream can redistribute with only one of the licenses if so desired, rather than both. It does NOT mean anyone can hold a specific distributor to the terms of one or the other licenses if they choose to be held to the other one. Thus, MS (if it is held to
Duncan
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master,
and if you use the program, he is your master."
R Stallman
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!