Microsoft/Novell Partnership

[John Macdonald]

On Sat, Nov 04, 2006 at 02:14:42PM +0000, Peter P. wrote:
> 
> John Macdonald <john at ...> writes:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I don't think that I have fallen into that trap. GPL is a license and I referred
> to that license and especially to its effect wrt. 'aggregate works' (which
> covers the extending part of 'embracing and extending' for most practical
> purposes imho).

The license of the GPL allows people to take actions that
copyright restrions would normally only permit if they get
explicit permission from the owner of the copyright.  If you
don't accept the terms of the license, you didn't have the
right to make a copy.

But, if code covered by GPL can be claimed to carry out a
process that is covered by a patent, copying the code is not
an issue, and permission from the author is irrelevant (unless
the author also is enforcing the patent).  The GPL can be used
to force the owner of the patent to stop copying the GPL code,
but if the patent owner doesn't care about distributing GPL
code that threat is especially hollow.

Microsoft has been getting over a thousand patents per year,
(thats the ones they apply for and get themselves, they also buy
lots of them).  It is absolutely certain that Linux contains
code that accomplishes tasks that are covered by patents that
MS owns.  In most cases, the patent is absurd - but it takes
a lot of work and money to challenge each one.  There can be
expensive court orders that do things like prevent sales -
even if you eventually win the challenge, not being able to
operate your business for the duration can be devastating.
And, maybe, a few of those patents will fail to be challenged
successfully.  That leads to trying to code around a concept,
which is harder than just rewriting the code independently.
Or it leads to having a U.S. fork and a rest-of-the-world fork.
That would be painful and hurt Linux badly.

MS would have to be careful about how they carry out such an
attack.  The European anti-trust actions seem to have some
teeth to them; and maybe someday the U.S. anti-trust process
will kick in again and find a government willing to back it
up instead of merely a slap on the wrist.

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