Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 18th Jul 2007 22:09 UTC, submitted by Kishe
Microsoft Microsoft says software that's licensed under a new version of a popular open source license isn't covered by the patent protection deal it recently signed with desktop Linux distributor Linspire. In a posting on its Web site, Microsoft said the Linspire client software protected by the patent deal doesn't include any parts of the distribution that "comprise or include Foundry Products, Clone Products, GPLv3 Software, or Other Excluded Products." The document was published on July 5, three weeks after Microsoft struck a deal with Linspire through which Linspire's customers are indemnified against Microsoft's patent claims against Linux users.
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RE[2]: And so it continues...
by lemur2 on Thu 19th Jul 2007 00:56 UTC in reply to "RE: And so it continues..."
lemur2
Member since:
2007-02-17

Then the value of the Microsoft patent deal will drop, If Gnome, KDE and the Kernel all move to v3, then the majority of the Operating System will not be covered by this covenant and MS will be forced to actually show their hand of patents and start sueing if they want to continue to profit from free software. At that point, all manner of hell will break loose in the corporate American world.


We are already at this point. The largest chunk of any Linux distribution is actually GNU software. Up to about a quarter of the code in a Linux distribution, maybe a bit more, is GNU software.

The GNU foundation is the author of the GPL license.

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

The GNU foundation has just gone through the process of writing the GPL v3 license, so you can bet their own software will go under than license.

GNOME is GNU software. It doesn't matter about the kernel or KDE, we are already at the point where it is just not possible to make a functional "Linux distribution" without GPL v3 software making up a large chunk of it.

Edited 2007-07-19 00:58

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 5

RE[3]: And so it continues...
by swoop on Thu 19th Jul 2007 05:51 in reply to "RE[2]: And so it continues..."
swoop Member since:
2007-07-19

So, Microsoft wants to get rid of all GNU software? No problem. We can start by removing GNU libc from the system. Somehow I feel the rest of the to-be-removed packages doesn't matter so much anymore.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 3