Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 3rd Apr 2007 17:13 UTC, submitted by davidiwharper
"The Free Software Foundation has published a third draft of the GPL3 license. The FSF had indicated leading up to this draft that it would be addressing some concerns it had with the Novell-Microsoft agreements in the draft. Here's Novell's position on the new draft."
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Member since:
2006-02-02
Assuming that the FSF is unbalanced enough to totally remove the so-called escape clause, and "lower the boom", as you suggest, Novell would have two possible actions available to them:
1) Renegotiate with Microsoft to specifically exclude GPL licensed code from the Microsoft deal (Personally, I think they should have done this from the start).
2) File suit against the Free Software Foundation for using it's position to prevent Novell from being competitive. Telling Novell to write/maintain their own code doesn't cut it, as no other Linux distro has (currently) such a restriction.
Given the number of public comments by people from both the FSF, and others such as Bruce Perens, it would be almost trivial to prove that the latest draft of the GPLv3 was designed to deliberately harm and/or punish Novell's business.
I suspect that this is why the grandfather clause exists in the current draft anyhow, and may explain the repeated delays on this draft.
Regardless, organizations like ACT (Association for Competitive Technology) are already putting out the press releases that I expected, that say that "See? We told you GPL is anti-business". Whatever YOUR opinion of ACT is, the reality is that they're a lobbyist organization, and they know how to get their message to both Congress, and big business.
Finally, I find it ironic that a community that reacts with such outrage to the use of submarine patents would be in favor of using the GPL as a weapon retroactively.