Microsoft/Novell Partnership

[John Macdonald]

On Fri, Nov 03, 2006 at 08:36:10PM +0000, Peter P. wrote:
> It is extremely unlikely that any part of 'Linux' contains any Microsoft IP
> since it has BSD Unix and U.C.Berkeley etc ancestry. Also anything GPL embraced
> and extended and republished with another license is going to place the GNU
> legal wing into battle position.

You've fallen into the trap of thinking that IP is a single
coherent concept.  It's not - it's a conglomerate of three
drastically different concepts.

There is copyright, that is the right of the author of a work
to control (within certain limits) whether and how copies of
the work are made.  That's what you're referring to when you
talk about the Unix ancestry.  SCO is valiantly proving that
Linux is not open to attack using copyright.

There is trademark, which gives the some control over how a
company's identity can be used.  (It's more complicated than
that but trademark is not really involved in the Novell-MS
agreement.)  Linspire has proven that Linux companies *are*
subject to being attcked with trademark - but the fact that
they just changed their name from Lindows and didn't get much
additional penalty shows that the attack is not especially
worrisome.

Finally, there is patent, which gives the owner control over
an idea; even if others have the same idea but are unable (or
can't afford the court costs) to prove that it was a well-known
or obvious idea before the patent was applied for.  There is
certainly reason to expect that Linux is susceptible to attack
through patents; just how badly is still open to question but
if Microsoft has a patent on some especially critical concept,
it could be crippling for Linux.  More likely are that MS has
lots of nasty patents that , while they can be worked around,
it can only be done with a bunch of work and end up with worse
code that is less interoperable with any commercial code that
makes use of the petent.  This is the core of the Novell-MS
agreement.  Offhand, I'm hoping that Eben Moglen's statement
that Novell might have put themselves into a position in which
they cannot legally distribute GPL-software that is covered by
the patents they have attained rights too, since they are unable
to pass on the right to use the patents to the extent required
by the GPL.  It will be interesting to see how that plays out.
If it is proven to be true, it will provide fuel for those who
claim that the GPL is a virus.  (They'll be wrong - you can
have proprietary code, and you can have GPL code, but you can't
merge the two and treat it a single entity.  The proprietary
code is just a viral as the GPL code in that scenario.)

-- 
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists