
It got little notice at the time, but Richard Stallman, the leader of the FSF, said at the fifth international GPLv3 conference in Tokyo on Nov. 21 that the Novell/Microsoft patent agreement
is not in violation of the GPL version 2. Stallman said, according to a
transcript published by the FSF Europe,
"What has happened is, Microsoft has not given Novell a patent license, and thus, section 7 of GPL version 2 does not come into play. Instead, Microsoft offered a patent license that is rather limited to Novell's customers alone."