Microsoft Gets Novell Docs Before OSS Community

flydpnkrtn sends in an InformationWeek article arising out of Novell's SEC filing yesterday, asking: "Is this just more Novell-bashing material? Or is this no big deal? And of course this type of thing runs contrary to the 'spirit of the GPL'..." "Under its controversial alliance with Novell, Microsoft is entitled to receive key technical documentation from the Linux distributor even if that documentation is not generally available to open source software developers, according to a Novell document."

Comments

Re:Don't Think This is Relevant

[Stewie241]

if Novell took a GPLed software and wrote documentation for it, should the documentation be under the GPL?

Well, I don't think all the books that have been written about Linux are GPL, are they? It is still illegal to redistribute these... I would consider these books to be documentation.

Ian

Re:I don't see any problem with this.

[TheRaven64]

The problem here IS that Microsoft appears to be collaborating with Novel Since the quote directly mentioned virtualisation, I would imagine that this related to the work Novell are doing to create a compatibility layer between the Vista hypervisor and Xen, allowing guests from one to run on the other.