The solution is clearly survey papers written in an understandable manner by trusted sources, whether it's a "Does Global Warming Exist?" article in National Geographic, or a bit in USA Today. Which brings us to the survey article at hand, about which the submitter is querying its accuracy and trustworthiness, and to the reason your scolding line about looking in newspapers is completely missing the point.
Well, except this isn't a survey article written to present a summary and synthesis of peer-reviewed findings for a popular reader, it purports to be a a thorough independent original analysis that rebuts particular findings, presented initially in a popular medium rather than a peer-reviewed one. While, of course, that doesn't mean it wrong, I've got limited time in my life, and prefer to spend more attention on people that have convinced at least a few people with some notional expertise in the field that they have some clue what's going on (that's not to say what gets into peer-reviewed journals is necessary true, just that it makes a pragmatic first-pass filter.)
I still get a lot of my first views of scientific results in newspaper articles about peer-reviewed research, and only actually go to the journal articles themselves when the popular presentation piques my interest (or when its one of the journals we get at home.)
If someone owns two systems, that means that both systems are going to fight for TV time for that consumer.
No, it doesn't. That assumes that TV time is fixed. Having systems (and presumably games: the only reason for one person to have two systems is because each is better for different kinds of games) that suit different moods means that you are more likely to want to sit in front of the TV and play games more of the time.
The Xbox360 and the PS3 are more closely targetted to the same type of user and use, the Wii is more differently targetted than either of the other two. For reasons beyond price, Wii+Xbox360 or Wii+PS3 seems more natural than PS3+Xbox360 (though I can see getting a PS3 for backward compatibility -- if you're a PS2 user now -- and technical advantages, and an Xbox360 because of XNA GSE if you are into homebrew content.)
But with the console market saying you think your customers ought to purchase a different gaming system is like BMW issuing a statement that in stead of its customers purchasing a Mercedes for their other driving needs, they should buy a Chevrolet (it's cheaper). You could still say, "Well, cars vs trucks." But in the end, there is still one driver, two vehicles. The driver is going to pick the one that best meets his/her needs at the time, or whichever is more fun. Same with the consoles. Gamers may have two, but they'll only use the one that's most entertaining.
And, just as with a BMW and a Chevy pickup, which is more entertaining or meets needs better at the time won't be constant from time to time for many users. Sure, some gamers are only interested in the kind of things the more expensive consoles will do better than the Wii, and some are only interested in the kinds of things the Wii does better. But some will be interested in both.
...but I don't look to newspapers for serious scientific research, I look to peer-reviewed scientific journals. But, that aside, the accusations in the article all seem to be things (relative role of solar forcing, the "medieval warm period", etc.) that have been discussed and dealt-with repeatedly in the literature, both as to their accuracy and their impact, there doesn't seem to be anything, on the first impression, new here.
Er, "Internet news is better than TV news" isn't evidence that TV news is "outdated". By the criteria you use, TV news was never better than newspapers, anyway. The only advantage TV news has ever had is that its easier for lazy people to passively access. Heck, the studies I've seen have always shown that, all other things being equal, watching more TV news produces, on average, less knowledge of current events, so in one sense TV news has always had negative utility as a mechanism for spreading true information about current events.
After 236 years of elections, both fair and foul, we need Web 2.0 to save deomcracy?!
Its an arms race. A lot of the threats to effective democracy are enhanced or enabled by technology (fine-grained political gerrymandering, targetted misinformation and push-polling, astroturfing in every medium known to mankind, etc.) So, yes, those interested in preserving democracy rather than allowing a narrow elite to run the government by control of information and elections need to make effective use of technology, as well.
Its like, at the beginning of the age of gunpowder, complaining that swords and bows have been adequate to defend a nation for several hundred years, so of course there is no need to use cannons and guns. Sure, its not important, unless you want to win.
Why shouldn't voting be restricted to people that know what the candidate stands for, or at least has one reason for voting for that person over an opponent?
But, your proposal doesn't restrict voting at all, even if that would be a good thing. It just reduces one clear and impartial source of factual information that voters have available in making their decision, making them more vulnerable to voting based on false information from dirty tricks.
If you want to limit voting based on a poll test that evaluates the kind of knowledge you suggest should be required, well, we could debate that. But the policies you propose don't enforce the knowledge requirements you suggest, they simply make it somewhat more difficult to get certain bits of information than is presently the case.
Should be require every mom-and-pop store and restaurant to buy a TDD (Teletype Device for the Deaf) so that deaf people can call them on the phone and place orders?
Well, in California, we have a statewide, free, public relay service so that TDD users can communicate with anyone with a phone with no problem, so its not an issue. I thought that was fairly common, and not unique to California.
Sure, Nintendo is trying to reach out to people who wouldn't normally game, and making it much easier for them to start. That's nice and all, but what all three companies are targeting is your time, on your TV.
No, see, at the beginning there you start to get the point, but then you jump right by it. The "you" to which Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony's efforts are primarily directed are not the same. Sure, each of them would take anyone who wants to buy their machine, but their focus is not the same slice of the market (though they all overlap to an extent.)
Wikipedia insits that there never needs to be any evidence for or against any claim, that anything anybody can type is somehow valid and that truth is decided by who has the most time on their hands to change other people's writing.
Uh, no, Wikipedia doesn't "insist" that, in fact it insists quite the opposite. If material is just something some random person typed without a reliable source, its "Original Research" forbidden by WP:OR and WP:VERIFY, and where there is a clash between "reliable sources", has a number of procedures designed to resolve matters other than by edit wars, including (among others) page protection, procedures to attempt to achieve consensus, and the Arbitration Committee.
Such is the danger of publicly disavowing any kind of standard of scholarship: You don't get to question the standard of scholarship of those who question you on anything.
Er, yeah. Too bad for your argument that it is readily verifiable that Wikipedia doesn't disavow any standards of scholarship. You may not like the manner in which they enforce or police the standards they have established, but its an outright lie to say they have "publicly disavowed any kind of standard of scholarship".
But seeing that the policy of wikipedia FORBITS original reseach or works to be presented, i dont think that plagiatism isnt really that much of a violation here.
Sure it is. If its plagiarized, its isn't verifiable because sources aren't cited properly and it is presented as original research (despite that being forbidden), so WP:VERIFY, WP:CITE, and WP:OR all come into play, whether or not it is also a copyright violation.
However, he is well aware that Wikipedia's "no copyright violations" policy requires users to immediately quash plagarized content.
How can one be "well aware" of something that isn't true? Wikipedia's copyright policies (WP:C and WP:COPYVIO) address copyright violations, not plagiarism. You can have a copyright violation without plagiarism—for instance, if the use of properly quoted, properly cited material exceeds legal "fair use", it is not plagiarism while it is a copyright violation. And you can likewise have plagiarism without copyright violation—for instance, if material is not subject to copyright (perhaps its a US government work) but is used without attribution and presented as someone else's work, it is plagiarism, but is not a copyright violation.
Wikipedia doesn't have a policy on "plagiarism", per se, AFAICT, though WP:VERIFY and WP:CITE are relevant to the issue.
Er, no, what I said was that as long as enough people who aren't idiots are editing Wikipedia, the fact that idiots are also editing Wikipedia doesn't, in and of itself, mean that Wikipedia contains no scholarship.
Sure, the quality will vary from article-to-article, but then, non-idiot readers will have the critical skills to distinguish crap articles from good ones to a degree appropriate for the application to which they are putting the information.
Try learning to read rather than merely rewrite to what you wish other people would say so that you could feel superior.
Paragraph 1 does not require that you grant the recipient any rights to do anything with the Program.
Paragraph 1 alone only applies to unmodified, source-only distributions, but yes, you are correct because in such a case you don't own any rights that can be licensed, anyhow.
Paragraph 2 only applies if you modify the Program, and hence is inapplicable in the vast majority of circumstances. As you recall, you argued that one could not fulfill the obligations of paragraph 2. If you have not modified the Program, then you have fulfilled them. You will also notice that paragraph 3 is quite similar to paragraph 1 in that it does not require that you grant the recipient any rights to do anything with the Program..
No, what I'll notice is that Paragraph 3 specifically requires that object/executable code be distributed under the rules of Paragraph 1 and 2. Unless the executable was received and redistributed as is, it will always be a modification or derivative work based on the source code (even if it is just rebuilt from source by the distributor), subject, therefore, to the Paragraph 2 rules on modifications, not the Paragraph 1 rules. I think, for someone in Novell's position, its quite likely that it is not passing on received binaries but building them, and thus that Paragraph 2's requirements will, through Paragraph 3, apply in most cases to binary distributions from them. Sure, there are some works that they may distribute unmodified source only, or unmodified source and unmodified executables received from a third party, thus avoiding Paragraph 2, but that seems unlikely to be particularly common.
Under your interpretation of the GPL, specifically your interpretation of paragraph 2(b), essentially every version of the Linux kernel since at least version 2.4 is almost certainly being distributed in violation of the GPL.
Assuming OSRM's secret analysis is correct, that may well be true.
The problem with your argument is that patent rights exist the moment that they are granted by the USPTO. There is no need for the rights to be asserted against anyone, there is no need for the patent to be "court-validated", see 35 U.S.C. 282, and there is certainly no need to you to have actual knowledge that the patent(s) exist.
Er, no, that's not a problem with my argument at all.
Yet the GPL is clearly not enforced in the manner that you are suggesting.
Well, considering that, AFAIK, the GPL is entirely untested in US courts at all, its kind of pointless to base any argument on how the GPL is or is not enforced, since its entirely speculative. Its even rather pointless to base arguments on IP owners not suing redistributors based on this kind of potential GPL violation, since its not clear if anyone in a position to sue is also aware of the particular patents that would make them able to sue. And, even then, lots of people in the open source community are opponents of software patents in the first place, and while they might raise them to defend themselves, may be unlikely to use them to stop people from spreading OSS in a way that seen as good for the community, even if they had the technical power to. So your attempt to rely on the way the GPL is currently "enforced" as a rebuttal is somewhat pointless.
...application programming will consist mostly of using collections (lets call them "libraries") of code other people have written in the past, along with constructing bits of glue code to connect them together.
Er, isn't that what is done now? I mean, sure, there are some situations where you can't rely on either actual libraries or the equivalent in the built in functionality of an HLL (like writing certain basic code either to support new hardware or to tweak existing low-level code for better performance or extended functionality), but its not like most programming today is "programming from scratch".
There's always, I think, going to be an irreducible amount of programming from scratch as long as new hardware is created which presents a new interface to software, but, yes, using code that other people have written avoid having to reinvent the wheel is important now, and will probably be increasingly important as there are more and more libraries of code out there that are available to use.
Seems to me that, while there is some colorful language in the description, there's not much new predicted here.
ut legally, the real issue here is Copyright, isn't it?
Not all issues are legal issues.
There is no copyright in facts.
Therefore, nonfiction works are open to have the facts used in Wikipedia.
Where a verbatim transcription would not be fair use, someone needs to paraphrase.
The issue here is verbatim use, anyway. An automated script is going to have more trouble finding use of "facts" from another source that aren't verbatim copies of the presentation.
Err... I thought works of the US Government were generally free from copyright...?
(1) The Wyoming state government is not the US government: state government works are not generally free from copyright.
(2) Plagiarism is separate from copyright violation, anyway. Using material that is not subject to copyright or is in the public domain that is from one unique identifiable source without crediting the source is plagiarism, as is using copyright material in a way that does not violate copyright without attribution (say, fair use.) Plagiarism isn't a violation of the law, but a violation of commonly accepted standards of integrity when it comes to not claiming other's work as your own.
Except the story specifically says he checked only about 12,000 of wikipedia's articles, so that would make it about 1% are plagiarized if you extrapolated.
Which would make sense to do if it was a systematic random sample, rather than a selection conducted by someone who has been on an anti-Wikipedia crusade for quite some time, as this one is. Of course, there is the question of the trustworthiness of the original number, as well, as the material was never independently reviewed, and Wikipedia's own reviews (as TFA notes) found some cases that Brandt did not eliminate where the other site appears to have copied Wikipedia rather than the other way around.
No it doesn't. I would provide further explanation, but you appear to deem such things to be mere triviality.
That's pretty childish.
But, anyway, my explanation is here: Paragraph 7 prohibits redistribution of the Program if you are unable for any reason to meet the requirements in any other part of the agreement (which is, really, somewhat redundant, but the provision is expressly a clarification.) Paragraph 2 requires redistributors to license under the same terms in the GPL, including those allowing modification, and redistribution (including redistribution for a fee). 35 USC 271 makes it an unlawful infringement of patent to make, to use, or to sell any patented invention during the patent term without authorization, which absolutely prohibits any person (even if they have a patent license) who does not have authority to sublicense the patent to provide any other person permission to redistribute unmodified for a fee the existing patent-protected invention (violating the right of sale); arguably the modification provision (which involves making a new infringing item) would also be a problem, though that's less clear as it is at least possible to make a non-infringing modification by changing the program into one which no longer is within the scope of the patent.
Consequently, if a piece of software is protected by a patent that you don't have the ability to freely license (and to grant others the ability to freely license, ad nauseum), you cannot fulfill the obligations that come with redistribution under Paragraph 2 of the GPL (specifically, you cannot grant, at least, the permissions in the last sentence of Paragraph 1), and therefore you are barred from redistributing the software at all by Paragraph 7.
(Of course, if you are the original author of the software, and it uses no material contributed under the GPL, you can initially distribute the software and offer the terms of the GPL without concern for Paragraph 7. OTOH, by purporting to give permission [e.g., the listed permission in Paragraph 1] that you are not authorized to give in the first place, you are engaging in misrepresentation which may be actionable in its own right.)
Anyone remember Corel, Corel Linux? Corel was bought by Microsoft, and then killed.
Except: Corel was never bought by Microsoft, and Corel's Linux distribution and development team were transferred to Xandros, which continues to distribute the Xandros Desktop series of OS products derived from the old Corel Linux.
Paragraph 7 makes it quite clear that Novell cannot distribute patent encumbered code under the GPL, even if it is free to distribute it, if the recipients are not free to redistribute it under the GPL, without violating the terms of the license it has from the people who it got the GPL code from.
Microsoft's freedom is not the issue here, so much as Novell's is.
If they assert those patents against Linux, then it breaks compatibility with nearly everything in the normal world of computing.
Only if they win. They could lose, either because the features were ruled not infringing or, worst possible case for Microsoft, the patent was invalidated.
Secondly, we're in MORE danger now, because of this deal. One of the possible legal retorts against patent infringement would be some sort of 'patent abuse' defence. If Microsoft was clobbering ALL Linux distros with patent lawsuits, then the victims could point out that the law would have the effect of destroying competition and upholding Microsoft's illegal monopoly in operating systems.
With Microsoft now partnering with one Linux distributor, that defence looks less likely to work, since they can point at their cooperation with SuSE.
Except, of course, if every OS vendor were compelled to deal with Microsoft on Microsoft's terms, that would, in fact, destroy any competition and make Microsoft the center of a giant OS trust. I don't see what law (statute or precedent) would be violated by Microsoft using patent lawsuits to solidify its OS monopoly but not violated by Microsoft doing the exact same thing simply because one "competitor" turned into a "partner" from the threat of that power.
The beauty of this is, that after the first strike, Microsoft's own partners subsequently get clobbered by a mixture of GPL enforcement and community disgust. Boom! Linux removed from the game as a commercial product.
Again, I think this is exaggerated. OTOH, maybe its just the opportunity OpenBSD needs to take its rightful place in the market...;)
That way avoids the 'patent abuse' defence, where RedHat could say that Microsoft can't enforce it's patents in a way that would destroy competition and uphold Microsoft's illegal monopoly.
If Novell is paying Microsoft rents, then it is part of Microsoft's monopoly. A monopoly is a firm's power of some area of commerce, not a product's, and as long as Novell's position is dependent on Microsoft, it is a component of Microsoft's market power in the OS field, not a challenge to that power, even if it does reduce the marketshare of the product actually sold directly by Microsoft in the OS market. (Heck, some of the original targets of trust busting were nominally independent, "competing" firms with joint agreements to divvy up the market and work together.)
I just can't agree with those saying this deal shields Microsoft from anti-trust litigation.
If MS tries to use patent law to shutdown Red Hat, it open's them up to anti-trust litigation.
I don't think so: anticompetitive practices, sure. Patent actions for actual violations? No, I don't think that opens them up to antitrust action. (Spurious patent actions amounting to a kind of vexatious litigation might, in addition to the usual remedies there, conceivably be used against them in an antitrust action, but I don't think the existence of a legal alternative that Microsoft receives payments from is any protection in that case.)
The agreement frees them up to use their patent portfolio as a weapon against Linux distributors like Red Hat.
Inasmuch as they are free to do so with the agreement, they were free to do so without it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, except this isn't a survey article written to present a summary and synthesis of peer-reviewed findings for a popular reader, it purports to be a a thorough independent original analysis that rebuts particular findings, presented initially in a popular medium rather than a peer-reviewed one. While, of course, that doesn't mean it wrong, I've got limited time in my life, and prefer to spend more attention on people that have convinced at least a few people with some notional expertise in the field that they have some clue what's going on (that's not to say what gets into peer-reviewed journals is necessary true, just that it makes a pragmatic first-pass filter.)
I still get a lot of my first views of scientific results in newspaper articles about peer-reviewed research, and only actually go to the journal articles themselves when the popular presentation piques my interest (or when its one of the journals we get at home.)
No, it doesn't. That assumes that TV time is fixed. Having systems (and presumably games: the only reason for one person to have two systems is because each is better for different kinds of games) that suit different moods means that you are more likely to want to sit in front of the TV and play games more of the time.
The Xbox360 and the PS3 are more closely targetted to the same type of user and use, the Wii is more differently targetted than either of the other two. For reasons beyond price, Wii+Xbox360 or Wii+PS3 seems more natural than PS3+Xbox360 (though I can see getting a PS3 for backward compatibility -- if you're a PS2 user now -- and technical advantages, and an Xbox360 because of XNA GSE if you are into homebrew content.)
And, just as with a BMW and a Chevy pickup, which is more entertaining or meets needs better at the time won't be constant from time to time for many users. Sure, some gamers are only interested in the kind of things the more expensive consoles will do better than the Wii, and some
are only interested in the kinds of things the Wii does better. But some will be interested in both.
...but I don't look to newspapers for serious scientific research, I look to peer-reviewed scientific journals. But, that aside, the accusations in the article all seem to be things (relative role of solar forcing, the "medieval warm period", etc.) that have been discussed and dealt-with repeatedly in the literature, both as to their accuracy and their impact, there doesn't seem to be anything, on the first impression, new here.
Er, "Internet news is better than TV news" isn't evidence that TV news is "outdated". By the criteria you use, TV news was never better than newspapers, anyway. The only advantage TV news has ever had is that its easier for lazy people to passively access. Heck, the studies I've seen have always shown that, all other things being equal, watching more TV news produces, on average, less knowledge of current events, so in one sense TV news has always had negative utility as a mechanism for spreading true information about current events.
Its an arms race. A lot of the threats to effective democracy are enhanced or enabled by technology (fine-grained political gerrymandering, targetted misinformation and push-polling, astroturfing in every medium known to mankind, etc.) So, yes, those interested in preserving democracy rather than allowing a narrow elite to run the government by control of information and elections need to make effective use of technology, as well.
Its like, at the beginning of the age of gunpowder, complaining that swords and bows have been adequate to defend a nation for several hundred years, so of course there is no need to use cannons and guns. Sure, its not important, unless you want to win.
But, your proposal doesn't restrict voting at all, even if that would be a good thing. It just reduces one clear and impartial source of factual information that voters have available in making their decision, making them more vulnerable to voting based on false information from dirty tricks.
If you want to limit voting based on a poll test that evaluates the kind of knowledge you suggest should be required, well, we could debate that. But the policies you propose don't enforce the knowledge requirements you suggest, they simply make it somewhat more difficult to get certain bits of information than is presently the case.
Well, in California, we have a statewide, free, public relay service so that TDD users can communicate with anyone with a phone with no problem, so its not an issue. I thought that was fairly common, and not unique to California.
Uh, no, Wikipedia doesn't "insist" that, in fact it insists quite the opposite. If material is just something some random person typed without a reliable source, its "Original Research" forbidden by WP:OR and WP:VERIFY, and where there is a clash between "reliable sources", has a number of procedures designed to resolve matters other than by edit wars, including (among others) page protection, procedures to attempt to achieve consensus, and the Arbitration Committee.
Er, yeah. Too bad for your argument that it is readily verifiable that Wikipedia doesn't disavow any standards of scholarship. You may not like the manner in which they enforce or police the standards they have established, but its an outright lie to say they have "publicly disavowed any kind of standard of scholarship".
How can one be "well aware" of something that isn't true? Wikipedia's copyright policies (WP:C and WP:COPYVIO) address copyright violations, not plagiarism. You can have a copyright violation without plagiarism—for instance, if the use of properly quoted, properly cited material exceeds legal "fair use", it is not plagiarism while it is a copyright violation. And you can likewise have plagiarism without copyright violation—for instance, if material is not subject to copyright (perhaps its a US government work) but is used without attribution and presented as someone else's work, it is plagiarism, but is not a copyright violation.
Wikipedia doesn't have a policy on "plagiarism", per se, AFAICT, though WP:VERIFY and WP:CITE are relevant to the issue.
Er, no, what I said was that as long as enough people who aren't idiots are editing Wikipedia, the fact that idiots are also editing Wikipedia doesn't, in and of itself, mean that Wikipedia contains no scholarship.
Sure, the quality will vary from article-to-article, but then, non-idiot readers will have the critical skills to distinguish crap articles from good ones to a degree appropriate for the application to which they are putting the information.
Try learning to read rather than merely rewrite to what you wish other people would say so that you could feel superior.
Paragraph 1 alone only applies to unmodified, source-only distributions, but yes, you are correct because in such a case you don't own any rights that can be licensed, anyhow.
No, what I'll notice is that Paragraph 3 specifically requires that object/executable code be distributed under the rules of Paragraph 1 and 2. Unless the executable was received and redistributed as is, it will always be a modification or derivative work based on the source code (even if it is just rebuilt from source by the distributor), subject, therefore, to the Paragraph 2 rules on modifications, not the Paragraph 1 rules. I think, for someone in Novell's position, its quite likely that it is not passing on received binaries but building them, and thus that Paragraph 2's requirements will, through Paragraph 3, apply in most cases to binary distributions from them. Sure, there are some works that they may distribute unmodified source only, or unmodified source and unmodified executables received from a third party, thus avoiding Paragraph 2, but that seems unlikely to be particularly common.
Assuming OSRM's secret analysis is correct, that may well be true.
Er, no, that's not a problem with my argument at all.
Well, considering that, AFAIK, the GPL is entirely untested in US courts at all, its kind of pointless to base any argument on how the GPL is or is not enforced, since its entirely speculative. Its even rather pointless to base arguments on IP owners not suing redistributors based on this kind of potential GPL violation, since its not clear if anyone in a position to sue is also aware of the particular patents that would make them able to sue. And, even then, lots of people in the open source community are opponents of software patents in the first place, and while they might raise them to defend themselves, may be unlikely to use them to stop people from spreading OSS in a way that seen as good for the community, even if they had the technical power to. So your attempt to rely on the way the GPL is currently "enforced" as a rebuttal is somewhat pointless.
...application programming will consist mostly of using collections (lets call them "libraries") of code other people have written in the past, along with constructing bits of glue code to connect them together.
Er, isn't that what is done now? I mean, sure, there are some situations where you can't rely on either actual libraries or the equivalent in the built in functionality of an HLL (like writing certain basic code either to support new hardware or to tweak existing low-level code for better performance or extended functionality), but its not like most programming today is "programming from scratch".
There's always, I think, going to be an irreducible amount of programming from scratch as long as new hardware is created which presents a new interface to software, but, yes, using code that other people have written avoid having to reinvent the wheel is important now, and will probably be increasingly important as there are more and more libraries of code out there that are available to use.
Seems to me that, while there is some colorful language in the description, there's not much new predicted here.
(1) The Wyoming state government is not the US government: state government works are not generally free from copyright.
(2) Plagiarism is separate from copyright violation, anyway. Using material that is not subject to copyright or is in the public domain that is from one unique identifiable source without crediting the source is plagiarism, as is using copyright material in a way that does not violate copyright without attribution (say, fair use.) Plagiarism isn't a violation of the law, but a violation of commonly accepted standards of integrity when it comes to not claiming other's work as your own.
Except the story specifically says he checked only about 12,000 of wikipedia's articles, so that would make it about 1% are plagiarized if you extrapolated. Which would make sense to do if it was a systematic random sample, rather than a selection conducted by someone who has been on an anti-Wikipedia crusade for quite some time, as this one is. Of course, there is the question of the trustworthiness of the original number, as well, as the material was never independently reviewed, and Wikipedia's own reviews (as TFA notes) found some cases that Brandt did not eliminate where the other site appears to have copied Wikipedia rather than the other way around.
That's pretty childish.
But, anyway, my explanation is here: Paragraph 7 prohibits redistribution of the Program if you are unable for any reason to meet the requirements in any other part of the agreement (which is, really, somewhat redundant, but the provision is expressly a clarification.) Paragraph 2 requires redistributors to license under the same terms in the GPL, including those allowing modification, and redistribution (including redistribution for a fee). 35 USC 271 makes it an unlawful infringement of patent to make, to use, or to sell any patented invention during the patent term without authorization, which absolutely prohibits any person (even if they have a patent license) who does not have authority to sublicense the patent to provide any other person permission to redistribute unmodified for a fee the existing patent-protected invention (violating the right of sale); arguably the modification provision (which involves making a new infringing item) would also be a problem, though that's less clear as it is at least possible to make a non-infringing modification by changing the program into one which no longer is within the scope of the patent.
Consequently, if a piece of software is protected by a patent that you don't have the ability to freely license (and to grant others the ability to freely license, ad nauseum), you cannot fulfill the obligations that come with redistribution under Paragraph 2 of the GPL (specifically, you cannot grant, at least, the permissions in the last sentence of Paragraph 1), and therefore you are barred from redistributing the software at all by Paragraph 7.
(Of course, if you are the original author of the software, and it uses no material contributed under the GPL, you can initially distribute the software and offer the terms of the GPL without concern for Paragraph 7. OTOH, by purporting to give permission [e.g., the listed permission in Paragraph 1] that you are not authorized to give in the first place, you are engaging in misrepresentation which may be actionable in its own right.)
Except: Corel was never bought by Microsoft, and Corel's Linux distribution and development team were transferred to Xandros, which continues to distribute the Xandros Desktop series of OS products derived from the old Corel Linux.
Paragraph 7 makes it quite clear that Novell cannot distribute patent encumbered code under the GPL, even if it is free to distribute it, if the recipients are not free to redistribute it under the GPL, without violating the terms of the license it has from the people who it got the GPL code from.
Microsoft's freedom is not the issue here, so much as Novell's is.
Only if they win. They could lose, either because the features were ruled not infringing or, worst possible case for Microsoft, the patent was invalidated.
If Novell is paying Microsoft rents, then it is part of Microsoft's monopoly. A monopoly is a firm's power of some area of commerce, not a product's, and as long as Novell's position is dependent on Microsoft, it is a component of Microsoft's market power in the OS field, not a challenge to that power, even if it does reduce the marketshare of the product actually sold directly by Microsoft in the OS market. (Heck, some of the original targets of trust busting were nominally independent, "competing" firms with joint agreements to divvy up the market and work together.)
I just can't agree with those saying this deal shields Microsoft from anti-trust litigation.