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Microsoft States GPL3 Doesn't Apply to Them
pilsner.urquell writes "Microsoft yesterday issued a statement proclaiming that it isn't bound by GPLv3. Groklaw has a very humorous rejoinder to the company's claim. From that article: 'They think they can so declare, like an emperor, and it becomes fiat. It's not so easy. I gather Microsoft's lawyers have begun to discern the GPL pickle they are in. In any case it won't be providing any support or updates or anything at all in connection with those toxic (to them) vouchers it distributed as part of the Novell deal ... These two -- I can't decide if it's an elaborate dance like a tango or more like those games where you place a cloth with numbers on the floor and you have to get into a pretzel with your hands and feet to touch all the right numbers. Whichever it is, Novell and Microsoft keep having to strike the oddest poses to try to get around the GPL. If they think this new announcement has succeeded, I believe they will find they are mistaken. In other words, not to put too fine a point on it, GPLv3 worked.'" EWeek has further analysis of this proclamation.
How can MS be bound by GPL3 if they avoided using GPL3ed code after June 29? Can you write code that is licensed by future versions of GPL? Wouldn't that make it dangerous for someone to use the code in case they do not like the future version? Sorry for the ignorance Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
Sounds about as useful as the emancipation proclamation and the time of it's creation. to sum up: Lincoln: "All the slaves in Confederated-held (aka not our)territories are free!" and MS: "We declare that we are free from the laws of the government under which we are placed"
How very interesting. The Novell support certificates that Microsoft distributes don't entitle the recipient to get support for GPLv3 code. So why would anyone buy one of these things from them?
If you want to distribute code, you need a license, or you are in violation of copyright law. So if the GPL is invalid, you don't have a license, since the GPL is the only thing giving you such a license to begin with. This simple logic has kept the GPL out of the courts, since (except for SCO) lawyers and the people that pay for them generally do not like unwinnable cases.
This current matter with Microsoft and the GPL3 is a completely separate issue, though. Microsoft aren't directly distributing code; they are just handing out vouchers for said code (or will be, if they continue handing out vouchers after Novell starts to distribute GPL3 code - which will be soon). That is Microsoft's defense - they aren't distributing the code themselves. Yet, if a major lawsuit should ensue between Microsoft and a Linux vendor, the issue may arise nonetheless: Even if Microsoft are not distributing the code, they are helping a partner to distribute it. This implies that they are tacitly not contesting certain claims in that code, or that the basic business model implied by that code is not seen as illegitimate by Microsoft. I am sure the lawyers can argue this for a few years.
So let's say that the GPLv3's lawyers are correct and that they find some means by which to bring Microsoft to court over non-distributed code. They'll sue Microsoft over Copywrite violation? Use the GPL as a defense against some future patent violation case (which will likely never come as it is much more useful as a threat)? So a bunch of geeks show up to court to thinking that they've got the big guy by the tail, and Microsoft's big nasty lawyers show up planning set a precident as to what counts as distribution and maybe give the GPL a hugely public defeat.
This entire saga sounds like the GPL crowd saying, "Aha! We got Microsoft," but I'm unconvinced that the world is turning because of it. IANAL, but I think that Microsoft would LOVE to test this in court.
I don't think it's the Linux Kernel MS has to worry about anytime soon. It's the hundreds of programs in a default SLES installation that are owned by the FSF. They will surely be released as GPLv3 very soon now.
If Novell wants to update the bulk of the userland programs in SLES they will surely at some point need to embrace GPLv3. It's that or fork the v2 versions and maintain them on their own.
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The Linux kernel is probably going to remain GPLv2 for quite a while, but the core of the GNU/Linux operating system is mostly GNU software which is (or will be) GPLv3 or later. Good luck making a Linux distro without GNU tools or anything GPLv3 in general.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
You think MS will go to court to set a precedent to *shrink* the scope of copyright?
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Jesus Tapdancing Christ, please read the fine article:
The GPL wasn't ruled on. It's never been tested by an actual ruling in the United States. Personally I think that GPL2 is a completely valid and applicable license (i.e. it terminates if it's breached, leaving you violating copyright), but there's no case law to directly support that, and all the wishing in the world won't make it otherwise.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Microsoft has always viewed the GPL as a virus, and has made all attempts to avoid contact. Their paranoia on this front is legendary, and for good reason when you hear the GPL crowd react to actual or perceived violations of the GPL.
With the Support certificates, microsoft was deliberately having a competitor actually handle the support and touch the GPL code. Which is all fine and good under GPL2.
The GPL3 patent covenant is even more toxic, especially to a company like Microsoft which has a lot of patents. So they are simply saying "our certificates will not support anything on GPLv3".
In many ways, this is Microsoft's paranoid overreaction, as they are not by any means a contributor to the code, even if the certificats were valid for GPLv3, but it is an understandable conservative reaction.
Since Microsoft has never and WILL NEVER contribute or distribute GPLv3 code, yes, the statement is perfectly correct.
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Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. Microsoft released a PR that said "we're not at threat." Surely that means a license which hasn't even been tested in court has "won." By the by, Microsoft is an enormous corporation with many, many lawyers. If you get lazy and start assuming you've won, then you've lost, no matter how strong your current position is.
Besides, in the long run, the camp which really won was BSD, because most large corporations are sick to death of the hoops they have to jump through for the GPL. I know, I'm going to get modded flamebait (even though I'm not flaming anyone) and troll (even though I'm not trolling) for saying this, since this is GPL love central, but in the long run, the love you get is equal to the love you give.
And MIT/BSD license gives out a hell of a lot more love than GPL. I know because my company started on the back of BSD code, and that code has more than doubled in size due to my contributions.
I'm not alone. GPL throws too much away. I believe GPLv3 is GPL's swan song, and I can't be happier that it's going away. It's time for people who write open source to stop closing it. Corporations donate an enormous amount of work to code, and GPL makes many market presences completely impossible. (Yeah yeah, linking, source release, aroo, don't care. I write Nintendo games, and it is literally impossible to use GPL code under the Nintendo license. This is a lot more common than zealots want to believe.)
Most government agencies can't use GPL. Anyone working on protected API hardware can't use GPL. Anyone working on protected hardware without a dynamic linker can't even use LGPL, which pretends it's supposed to fix these problems (hence the sweeping changes to FLTK's license.) On and on it goes.
Real men don't give code to just some people.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
What do all these have in common. It uses current cash to cover up misdeeds and protect future profits. Who in this world has a billion dollars to sue MS for violating the GPL. Do I see any hands? Then it does not apply to them right now. Perhaps in 5 or 10 years, if someone actually finds the money to sue, it will. But then it probably won't make difference.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
A simple "no" would suffice. We can add our own editorial.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Do you realize how stupid that just sounded:
Unless a contract, a license, or other document has stood up under court testing, it will remain in question until it has been tested. Until then, your pronouncement should remain a statement of faith and not fact, keeping in mind, dogma != fact.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
We just don't know, and won't until it's adjudicated.
OTOH, as Eben Moglen is fond of pointing out, it's unlikely that there are any lawyers foolish enough to take the GPL to court, so that will probably never happen. Even the fools at SCO aren't dumb enough to try seriously arguing that the GPL is invalid.
The reason no one wants to try to invalidate it is very simple: If you successfully invalidate the GPL, all you've achieved is to prove yourself guilty of copyright infringement. Doh! What you have to do is to argue that the GPL is valid, so that you actually have permission to distribute the software you don't own, *but* that the rather clear and mild stipulations attached to that permission somehow shouldn't apply to you.
That's a really hard argument to make. So hard that no one wants to try. Especially when they know that someone of the caliber of Eben Moglen is just waiting to slash through their necessarily tortuous logic.
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While it's useful to know the exact legal status of the vouchers and GPLv3 implications, let's not lose sight of the more important issue here. This whole MS-Novell agreement was, on MS' part (and, IMHO, that's all that matters here; Novell's motives are very secondary), intended to frighten users away from "wild" versions of Linux through the phantasm of patent litigation, and corral them into using only versions distributed by MS "partners," either in order to extract a Microsoft tax or generally suppress Linux adoption.
The critical aspect of the vouchers controversy is not whether MS is definitely bound by the GPL to refrain from patent litigation against corporate Linux users;the critical aspect is, How does this affect the perceptions of the potential victims, er, customers? If you consider the potential for the voucher-and-GPLv3 combination to defuse MS' patent threats in any possible litigation, together with the refusal of most Linux distributors to play along with MS, the net FUD effect of MS' patent-threat campaign would seem to be significantly diminished. THAT, I submit, is the critical factor in this whole circus.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
You can't apply it at redistribution. The hole point of the GPLv2 and v3 is they are non-retractable. Once you have let someone copy it under v2 they will have that option for evermore.
Simply saying "latest version of the GPL" should ensure that any new features are covered by the license that was current when they are first downloaded. (Though a system to update all your source files to specify an exact version should be easy to implement and would make proving which version was relevant a lot easier.)
New users could also be bound to the latest version if they get a copy from you, but they would have the option of finding someone who had downloaded a copy under and old version of the license, and getting a copy under that license from them.
Yes, it's an exaggerated example. But the point is that while distributing coupons doesn't necessarily mean that you're distributing the product itself, on the other hand the courts cannot allow people to circumvent laws by using indirection tricks like "coupons" and "vouchers."
A less exaggerated example would be a company that hires some other company to do something illegal (e.g. copyright infringement). The small company gets sued and goes bankrupt. The big company, however, claims that they cannot be sued because they didn't do anything illegal. But surely outsourcing isn't a valid way to side-step the law.
I think it's unclear how exactly this would end up in court. MS can make the case that they are distributing vouchers and not code. Others can make the case that they are distributing code through an affiliate, namely Novell. (After all, they have very public agreements in place with Novell.)
Yes sir. The GPL is a unilateral contract offer that one side has already agreed to. Thus it goes into effect as soon as the other side agrees. Since Microsoft has not explicitly agreed to the license (or explicitly distributed GPLed code, thus signifying acceptance or violation of copyright law) then Microsoft is not bound. That's my interpretation anyway. Providing a credit offer to pay for someone else's services does not, in any legal theory I've ever heard, bind you to the terms of the transaction between the buyer and the seller. You may accept certain legal responsibilities in that case (generally only as far as assuring that your offer was completed to the full written and intended terms of the contract between you and the buyer), but you have no real relation to the seller.
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There's a very big false assumption that everybody seems to be making here. I am, of course, not a lawyer (so this is not legal advice).
MS have not distributed GPL3 code, no matter how much we would like them to have. They have offered a covenant not to sue Novell's customers, and vouchers offering support for Novell's product. This is very different. None of this makes MS a party to the GPL because MS do not need any kind of license or copyright provision just to say "I won't sue Joe Bloggs, and I'll help him with his technical issues". No matter what the FooBarSpecialLicense attached to the product Joe Bloggs happens to own says!
(And if you think otherwise ask yourself this: what part of copyright law would MS have broken by saying "I'm happy to assist with Joe's problem but I don't agree to your license agreement"? On what grounds could you sue them? Or if they say "Mr Novell, if you sell Joe a copy of product X, I'm happy to talk to him about any problems he has with it; but I don't agree to your license agreement" What would you sue them for? If there is no potential copyright breach, there is no license.)
What the Novell-MS deal could have impinged on was Novell's right to distribute SUSE at all. If they were unable to offer the equal patent cover required by the GPL (and clearly they are unable to extend Microsoft's offer of patent protection to non-customers without Microsoft's consent), then they would have been unable to meet the terms of the GPL3 and thus unable to legally distribute the software. Except that Eben Moglen kindly gave them a get-out clause at the end of paragraph 11 of the GPL.
In most countries, as I understand it, even if Novell hadn't been given a get-out clause, the only result would have been the Novell-MS deal being "frustrated". "Frustration" is where an unforseen circumstance prevents a contract from being possible to fulfill. This appears to me to have happened. An unforseen change (the FSF deliberately altering the GPL licensing terms to affect the deal) would have prevented Novell from being able to fulfill its end of the Novell-MS deal. It wouldn't have been able to distribute SUSE under GPL3 because it couldn't extend MS's patent provisions beyond what MS offered in the initial contract without asking MS first. Thus the Novell-MS deal would get terminated, and there might have been a little wrangle about "reasonable recompense for the services provided". (Novell would need to go along to a court to get the contract declared frustrated, however.)
But with the get-out clause in para 11, even that won't happen.
All up, Eben Moglen's grand plan doesn't seem to amount to a hill of beans.
Disclaimer: Once again, this isn't legal advice. It is based on an engineer's shaky memory of engineering law lectures, and has the potential of being utterly wrong.
Good luck making a Linux distro without GNU tools
What, they're going to revoke my existing GPL2 installations?
If the GPL has never gone to court in this way, it's for the same reason that continental ballistic missiles have never been used in combat. No one doubts that continental ballistic missiles could blow the face off half the planet, so it never escalates that far.
The threat of copyright law (because if you don't have the GPL, all you have is someone else's IP and no license to use it) it is substantial enough that anyone who actually consults a lawyer will try to avoid taking it to court.
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Gee willikers, Microsoft: so sorry about that (but you are so bound) !
Turn about is fair play, as far as I am concerned. I didn't purchare
Win2K under License 6. Why should I now be subject to your change
in license only because I needed a Service Pack to fix your crappy
software?
If there was truely justice in this world, Microsoft would have been
broken up into at least 5 different pieces (operating units) at the
end of the DOJ anti-trust trial. It was GWBush's "free enterprise,
but only for the really big companies ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
contributors" rise to power that saved your "800 pound gorilla".