Groklaw has a great post explaining just how badly Microsoft shot itself in the foot when it set up Novell to grant licenses to the patents that Linux supposedly infringes upon. The idea was that Novell would give these licenses to its Linux customers, creating a climate of fear in corporate Linux users, who would worry that Microsoft might sue them for patent infringement.
The new version of the GPL turns this tactic on its head. It says that if you give any of your customers a license to a patent that pertains to GPLed software, you have to offer all Linux users the same terms. Now that Novell is giving out free licenses for Microsoft’s patent portfolio to its customers, with Microsoft’s blessing, it means that all Linux users get a free license to all Microsoft patents that cover Linux!
I think after reading all this, you can see why the company decided to try to scrape the Novell vouchers off of its shoes like toilet paper stuck to the bottom. But with the vouchers having no expiration dates, I really wonder if what they have done is enough. So when I read Microsoft’s statement that it isn’t bound by GPLv3, I’d call it hopeful optimism that the changes they’ve announced will help them retreat from what would inevitably have been a huge GPLv3 impact. I read it as saying, “*Now* we aren’t bound, any more, because we stopped doing what we were doing that would have bound us.”
But those pesky vouchers with no expiration date…. the saga is not yet over. So, let’s just say, to be continued.
As for Microsoft’s statement that they “remain committed to working with the open source community”, I have to ask, how will that work, when the GPL is the dominant license chosen by the authors of the community’s code? One can’t help but wonder how well Microsoft understands the GPL even now. They have brilliant lawyers, no doubt about it, but they are not GPL specialists, and law is a profession of specialization, as you have just witnessed.
(via /.)