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If this is Tuesday, it must be time to write a Microsoft-GPL blog post. This debate is always a sure thing subject during the dog days of summer when nothing else of interest is happening.

Last week, Microsoft put out a statement in response to the Friday June 29 release of the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL v3). In what must be the understatement of the still young 21st century, it began: "Microsoft is not a party to the GPLv3 license …" Why would anyone think it was? The open source software (OSS) community itself—including many users of GPL v2 (not to mention users of Apache, Mozilla, Berkeley, etc. OSS licenses)—still seems pretty divided over the new GPL license wording so until the OSS world gets its act together, why care what Microsoft thinks?

Maybe Microsoft is just feeding the fire among the left and right wings of the OSS community, a little summertime sport? Apparently the Free Software Foundation (FSF) or allied organizations are now claiming that the GPL v3 wording applies retroactively to the Novell-Microsoft November 2006 agreement. This was the arrangement that included Microsoft giving out Novell SUSE Linux "coupons" thereby in some opinions becoming "distributors" of GPL v2-licensed Linux. Earlier the FSF founder was quoted (or interpreted) as saying that GPL v3 did not apply to the coupon caper. He said that the FSF would make changes to GPL v3 to make sure others could not do what Novell and Microsoft had done with GPL-licensed code but that the horse was out of the barn for last year's agreement.

Mary Jo Foley asks the question this way at her blog: "Is Microsoft legal holding a trump card that no one knows about? The answer is probably yes. Microsoft is really saying "we are not distributing no-stinking Linux, we're distributing coupons." Read the Microsoft statement again and you see that it is all about the certificates. After the opening understatement, the subject of the second, third and fifth sentences are the coupons. (The fourth and final sentences remind everyone that Microsoft has some patents in this area just in case anyone would like to contest them.)

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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