Inside the Microsoft-Novell deal

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Cath Everett ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 30 Apr 2007 13:43 BST

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...may be consistent with the letter of the GPL, it is certainly not felt to be in keeping with its spirit. It is instead considered to be a clever but discriminatory trick to get round it.

Brett Smith, licensing compliance engineer at the Free Software Foundation, explains: "The patent aspects of the deal undermine many of the defences that the free software community has built up over the years. Now that Microsoft has paid a royalty for free software that it didn't develop and distribute, it means that there's pressure on everyone else to pay royalties too."

Moreover, the organisation continues to believe that users should not be required to pay royalties to use free software and felt that "it was surprising that a free software distributor would be willing to undermine the community in this way".

As a result, to try and tackle these issues, the Free Software Foundation has amended the forthcoming third version of the GPL (GPLv3) in two ways, which are currently being debated by the community. The first revision stipulates that, if patent protection is provided to some code recipients by an individual, organisation or third party, the same protection should automatically be extended to all.

The second amendment suggests that anyone involved in a patent deal similar to that engaged in by Microsoft and Novell will be prohibited from distributing software under GPLv3.

Smith acknowledges that the latter proposal has been controversial because "some companies involved in the free-software community are afraid they'll be punished for cross-licensing deals they've done in the past that aren't harmful to the community. But if we discover that it has this effect, we'll limit the timeframe for prohibition to ensure that no-one is hurt by the new terms."

Echoes of the 'Unix wars'
The impact of this clause on Novell, if it were made retroactive, would be that "as more and more free software is written and published by the development community under GPLv3, Novell wouldn't be able to include it in its distribution and so would lose its technical advantages". While the vendor could continue distributing Suse Linux under version 2 of the GPL licence, such a scenario would obviously dent its open-source credentials considerably.

The move also illustrates the Free Software Foundation's intent to remedy what it considers a dangerous situation. "If the clause is retroactive, it has quite serious repercussions for Novell, but if not, the patent protection is extended to all free software users so we're covered both ways," explains Smith.

In Goulde's opinion, this all has rather worrying echoes of the old Unix wars of the 1990s, which were exacerbated by Microsoft throwing Windows NT into the mix. In fact, he believes that the industry could be witnessing the start of the Linux wars, not least because of Red Hat's refusal to support the Linux Foundation's Linux Standards Base to try and standardise the various distributions. Again he sees this move as reminiscent of attempts to standardise Unix under the Open Group's Spec1170 initiative.

"It's an interesting dynamic. Novell is competing against Red Hat, while Oracle has fired a shot across Red Hat's bows with its Unbreakable Linux initiative. Microsoft is battling for its own business at the operating system level and to some extent has fired a shot across Red Hat's bows with the Novell deal too," he says.

Moreover, just to make things even more fraught, Red Hat, Oracle and Microsoft are all competing for dominance at the middleware level as they bid to lock customers into their own environments and ensure that third-party offerings are simply add-ons.

"The question is, is the Linux Foundation going to become a venue for the Linux wars? We'll be watching what happens there very closely," Goulde concludes.

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