Re: [Sheflug] NVidia on SuSE and the SuSE/Novell/M$ thing

[Alex Hudson <home@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2007-03-28 at 11:20 +0100, Lesley Binks wrote:
> Alex Hudson wrote:
> > No, the "dogmatists" are upset because Novell has signed a patent
> > agreement with Microsoft which deliberately circumvents the provisions
> > of the GPL. Effectively, they're saying "You're only safe from Microsoft
> > patents on Linux if you use our distribution".
> 
> Well, shouldn't the dogmatists ensure the GPL is upheld or that GPL'd
> material is removed when there are other patents and licenses that
> contravene it.  And insisting that all GPL'd material is removed from
> SuSE would kill SuSE as a Linux distro, right?

It's not specifically disallowed under the GPL; that's really the issue
- Novell found a loophole and exploited it.

Basically, the GPL says, "If you have patent licences that cover a piece
of [GPL'd] software, you have to give other people access to those or
not distribute the software at all". That's to ensure that people can't
restrict GPL'd software by using non-copyright means (patents, in this
case), because that would effectively undermine the GPL.

What Novell did was to not get the licences themselves, but they did get
Microsoft to offer those licences to the Novell's users. So, they don't
fall under the patent clause of the GPL, and thus they've created this
special class of users who are "safe" from Microsoft.

It's not really about being dogmatic. It's saying that Novell
effectively went against the spirit, but not the letter, of the GPL.
That doesn't make them a good member of the community. That's not to say
that everything else they do is wrong, but many people feel that they
want to protest Novell doing that by boycotting their distro.

> > Hence why there isn't an issue with Red Hat and Fedora: Red Hat have
> > never signed any private agreement with any entity (that I know of) that
> > is at all similar.
> 
> But as far as I understand it there is some involvement with Novell and
> RH over CentOS? Or is that wrong?

I think that's completely wrong :) Red Hat don't have anything to do
with CentOS per se, other than providing the sources for it (which isn't
a special arrangement for Cent OS, they have to do it because it's free
software), and as far as I know Novell have absolutely nothing to do
with it whatsoever.

Cheers,

Alex.


_______________________________________________
        Sheffield Linux User's Group
  http://wwww.sheflug.org.uk/mailfaq.html
 GNU - The choice of a complete generation