What has happened is, Microsoft has not given Novell a patent license, and thus, section 7 of GPL version 2 does not come into play, Stallman told the GPLv3 Conference in Japan, according to a transcript of his speech produced by the Free Software Foundation Europe.
Stallman’s comments put to rest the suggestion that Microsoft’s promise not to sue Waltham, Massachusetts-based Novell’s customers means that Novell has violated the GNU General Public License.
Section 7 of that license states that an agreement that requires royalty payments for the right to distribute GPL software cannot be distributed under the GPL, however both Microsoft and Novell had already denied that is the case, as their agreement is a covenant not to sue, rather than a license.
The FSF’s general counsel, Eben Moglen, has performed his own analysis of the deal. While the results of that are yet to be published, Moglen has indicated that changes will be made to the forthcoming GPL v3 to ensure that the Novell/Microsoft deal could not be repeated.
Stallman confirmed the plan. It turns out that perhaps it’s a good thing that Microsoft did this now, because we discovered that the text we had written for GPL version 3 would not have blocked this, but it’s not too late and we’re going to make sure that when GPL version 3 really comes out it will block such deals, he said.
Now that we have seen this possibility, we’re not going to have trouble drafting the language that will block it off, Stallman added. We’re going to say not just that if you receive the patent license, but if you have arranged any sort of patent licensing that is prejudicial among the downstream recipients, that that’s not allowed.
Open source advocate Bruce Perens last week warned Novell that any change to the GPL license preventing a repeat of its deal with Microsoft could leave the company maintaining outdated and unsupported software unless it turns its back on the Microsoft deal.
