Re: GPLv3 comedy unfolding -- Varghese: "the sting remains, says RMS"

[Alexander Terekhov]

rjack wrote:
[...]
> Yikes!
> 
> ACT put the fear of the Lord in Herr Moglen, Stallman and Perens.
> 
> http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2111879,00.asp

Never underestimate <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgezxJJa6aU>. :-)

http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/12566/1090/

------
GPLv3: the sting remains, says RMS        

By Sam Varghese     

Friday, 01 June 2007  

The Free Software Foundation will publish the last call draft of the
third revision of its General Public License (GPLv3) today and has
retained sufficient bite in it to penalise Microsoft.

FSF founder Richard M. Stallman said yesterday that he had decided to
include a cut-off date in paragraph 7 of section 11 of the draft to make
it possible for Novell to continue to distribute software covered under
GPLv3 as part of its deal with Microsoft.

In the last draft, released on March 28, section 11 specifically dealt
with problems posed by the Novell-Microsoft deal.

In an explanatory note issued a day before its release, the FSF said the
draft "...deals with the most acute danger posed by discrimination among
customers, by ensuring that any party who distributes others’
GPL-covered programs, and makes promises of patent safety limited to
some but not all recipients of copies of those speciii?c programs,
automatically extends its promises of patent safety to cover all
recipients of all copies of the covered works."

And to prevent such things happening in the future, the draft said that
any entity, which was already part of a deal which provided patent cover
in the manner that the Novell deal does, cannot distribute software that
is under the GPLv3. There was a cutoff date of March 28 but it was only
provisional in the draft; Stallman says this will now be made part of
the last call draft. 

"I decided to include the date cut-off that makes paragraph 7 (of
section 11) forbid only deals made after last March - which means it
will not forbid Novell from distributing GPLv3-covered software under
the effects of its deal with Microsoft," he said. 

"When Novell does that, paragraph 6, which has no date cut-off, will
apply. We expect this to make the deal backfire against Microsoft, by
extending the deal's limited patent protection for Novell customers to
the whole user community. That is a better outcome than forbidding
Novell from distributing the software, and that is why I made this
decision." 
------

LOL.

regards,
alexander.

--
"I can change the rules."

   Herr Prof Eben
http://www.linux.com/blob.pl?id=796772290d97058074d8c909e3dde1eb