Two weeks of vacation and now such big inbox ;) Am Saturday 04 November 2006 14:01 schrieb Pascal Bleser: ... > The fact that Novell might violate the GPL if there is an IP litigation > case against other Linux businesses (e.g. Redhat) and if MS wins that > litigation case in court, it would mean that e.g. Redhat would be > condemned, but not Novell. > This is a pretty hypothetical theory, as there hasn't been any > successful IP litigation claim against the Linux kernel or other > opensource projects until now (that's what SCO tried to do).
Just to clarify this (as a non-lawyer without official opinion ;): 1. It is right that it is not allowed to limit the rights of GPL software via patents (or in any other ways). 2. It is right that this can't get workarounded by such an agreement. But consequence is that no one (neither Novell or MS or someone else) is allowed to put software under GPL, if the software is protected by other rules (like a patent). It can not be shipped by anyone in a legal way under this license, even not by the original author. So as long as there are patents and you consider that they apply and the lead to an additional limition, you can not use GPL (and other licenses) for this software. There can be of course software under some other license where this part of agreement is helpfull. (Btw, this may sound like GPL is a bad license, but the reason for it is that it guarantees that you really can reuse the code without any other limitations. So it is definitive a good rule for the open source world.) > And without the Novell/MS agreement, the situation would have been > exactly the same, except that SLED/SLES customers would have been a > potential target as well. right bye adrian -- Adrian Schroeter SUSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nuernberg, Germany email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
