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Microsoft Excludes GPLv3 From Linspire Deal
rs232 writes to tell us that Microsoft is excluding any software licensed under the new GPLv3 from their recent patent protection deal with Linspire. "Microsoft has since been treating GPLv3 software as though it were radioactive. 'Microsoft isn't a party to the GPLv3 license and none of its actions are to be misinterpreted as accepting status as a contracting party of GPLv3 or assuming any legal obligations under such license,' the company said in a statement released shortly after GPLv3 was published on June 29. In addition to excluding GPLv3 software from the Linspire deal, Microsoft recently said that it wouldn't distribute any GPLv3 software under its SUSE Linux alliance with Novell, even as it maintains in public statements that the antilawsuit provisions in the license have no legal weight. "
Do they still not get the optional "later versions" clause that covers most GPL2 software?
Worse for Microsoft, they were being clever-dicks and trying to work around existing license terms. All that GPL3 does is make GPL2 these terms implicit; all of which a court would take into consideration.
Microsoft will never sue - they know that the only thing they can do is amke noises. Actually suing would be the equivalent of a first strike in a MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction - scenario, which they would ultimately lose.
The resulting positive publicity for linux would further erode their already slipping grip on their customer base. Like it did with allthe SCO BS.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Sorry, but I have to correct you. F5 BigIP now runs, and has for quite a while now, RHEL 3. That's GNU/Linux for the avoidance of any doubt - not BSD.
Or GNOME or KDE for that matter. Hell, he probably doesn't even use any open source systems because you still need some GPL-licensed program (GCC) to make it work, even with systems like OpenBSD.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Which is true as far as it goes. The missing detail is the vouchers MS have been selling for SUSE Linux which have no expiry date. This means that, in principle, if anyone redeems such a voucher for a copy of SLES, and if that collection contains any code licenced under GPLv3 at the time they redeem the voucher, then there's a chance MS may be held to account under the terms of GPLv3.
Now whether that will stand up in a court of law or not is another matter. Eben Moglen and RMS seem to think so, since they wrote the new licence to allow the MS-Novell pact specifically for this reason. But like I say, we won't know for sure until it's tested in court.
On the other hand it seems reasonably certain that Microsoft sees some legal exposure there, or they wouldn't be making such a fuss. Because for all they talk as if the licence poses no threat to them, they are nevertheless backing away from it at every opportunity.
The thing is that if the GPLv3 does apply, then anyone they sue for patent violation hereafter is going to be able to claim that Microsoft licenced the patent for their use - else they had no right to distribute in the first place. That too will need to be tested in court, but again it seems that Microsoft are taking the threat seriously.
So that's "so what". It's not Microsoft don't use GPLv3 and we think they should.
It's more a case of MS may already be using GPLv3 which makes them a lot less scary.
Hope that helps, have a nice day.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Sigh. http://www.fsdaily.com/Opposition/Misleading_Infor mationWeek_GPLv3_article/
avast!
Did I say that all of the statements were contradictory?
no.
(a) and (d) can be true at the same time provided that the woman in question was not the plaintiff's wife. It is entirely consistent. The woman in question was not the plaintiff's wife, and the defendant did not _think_ that the woman in question was not the plaintiff's wife.
speck, eye, log, misplaced double negative- if the defendant thought the woman he slept with was the plaintiff's wife, he could not make statement (d). You're not allowed to change the facts to fit your argument.
So I'll assume the second bold "not" is a typo, and address that argument instead. While it is possible to construe a situation where (a) and (d) could be true, that situation does not comport with the context I gave in my original post. (d) implies that defendant actually slept with plaintiff's wife by offering an excuse or justification for the alleged transgression. To read it otherwise is to engage in unnecessary parsing.
I hate to be pedantic
So don't do it. You'll feel better. I'll freely admit that the wikipedia dog example is a more clearly defined example of contradictory statements [P: Your dog bit me! D: (a) my dog was tied up (b) I don't believe you were bitten (c) I don't have a dog], but that's not the way I heard the story.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
Old versions of samba exist. It'll just fork. There's already a fork - samba-tng - and we don't know what's happening to that yet.
Maybe you can distill the objections for us? I read the entire thread. I can't point to any logical objection. As I recall, the principle 'objection' was that GPLv3 places restrictions on hardware. It doesn't. It only restricts distribution of GPLv3 code. If you take away the freedom of the users, whether it be through patents, with-holding source code, or technical restrictions (tivoisation), then you cannot distribute.
The rest was a bunch of straw-men and red herrings (c.f. Linus' bizarre assertion that the FSF wasn't letting him choose his own license). I was stunned by the misology. Alan Cox seems to be the only one with a level head.
Uh, yeah we do. According to its Wikipedia entry, it's pretty much dead. It's at version 0.4.99, which was released almost two years ago, and apparently hasn't had more than "minimal" development since it was forked:
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Actually, that was one of the intentions, and the GPL 3 is more compatible with other open source licenses. It's incompatibility with itself is an essential part of the license, otherwise it would be like a submarine with a screen door. That's why the FSF recommends you allow re-licensing of the work under later version of the GPL, then compatibility is not a problem.
Samba had been encoding/decoding network packets in a very manual way, with a collection of ugly macros to do the job. Samba-TNG was forked largly to switch over to doing RPC via IDL (an Interface Devinition Language, which gets processed at build time to produce *.c stub/wrapper functions to do the marshalling and unmarshalling).
The main Samba team learned their lesson. They switched to an IDL for Samba 4. Samba-TNG has been a very close clone of the Microsoft implementation, warts included. Samba 4 is far better.
Thus Samba-TNG has served it's purpose: teach the Samba developers that IDL is a good idea. Done. Mission accomplished.