Novell, Microsoft partnership
p2pnet.net News:- With news of a Microsoft / Novell patent cross licensing and technical partnership deal comes further news that Red Hat is promising protection against IP lawsuits.
“As with any indemnification provision, if [a customer] were to get sued for intellectual-property infringement over code they got from us, the provision of the indemnification language kicks in,” Silicon.com has Red Hat deputy general counsel is Mark Webbink saying
“At that point, we step into their shoes [to handle the legal attack],”
It’s a new element to Red Hat’s Open Source Assurance program, “which guarantees customers that the company will rewrite code found to violate another’s intellectual property,” says the story, altough it has Webbink saying the earlier version of the Open Source Assurance was more critical and Red Hat will, “continue to stand behind that”.
On adding indemnification, Silicon.com quotes Webbink as stating, “Our management and board looked at it and said, ‘look, this isn’t worth a hill of beans but if saying it will make people feel better, we’ll say it’. We’ve added it to the programme.”
Meanwhile, the MS Novell patent cross licensing deal will be incompatible with both the GPL3 licence and is likely to be incompatible with the current licence, says Eben Moglen in vnunet.com.
“Section seven of the current General Public Licence (GPL2) prohibits people or corporations from distributing the GPL code if they have entered into any agreements that contradict the conditions of the licence,” says the story. “If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this licence and any other pertinent obligations, you may not distribute the program at all,” the GPL licence states.
This would stop Novell, “from making it mandatory for users to pay a licence fee for its Linux distribution if Microsoft had required this as part of the patent agreement,” it declares.
“Novell needs to show affirmatively that the terms of its arrangement with Microsoft do not impact on the freedoms that they must be able to pass along under the GPL,” Moglen told venunet.com.
But from an open-source community perspexctive, “I would say: nothing can stop us now,” The Inquirer has Novell European president Tom Francese stating. “The movement has been fully embraced by one of the last bastions, Microsoft. We can go to market with IBM, HP, Dell, but now that includes Microsoft.”
Asked if there had been any reaction from users, “We had calls throughout the night,” said Francese. “I`m an out-in-the-field person and customers have been calling saying ‘now we can select an open-source partner and if we select Suse Linux we are completely free and unencumbered by concerns on intellectual property’.
“But,” pointed out The Inquirer, “previously open-source vendors have always argued that there is no major user concern on IP ”
“There`s always been the bogeyman thing,” retorted Francese. “We always felt we`re OK to move forwards and now there`s no grey area at all. There`s always a boardroom discussion about risk in any project so another barrier has been taken down.”
Also See:
Silicon.com – Red Hat does freebie Linux legal protection, November 6, 2006
vnunet.com – Novell Microsoft partnership faces GPL hurdle, November 6, 2006
The Inquirer – Novell speaks on Microsoft deal, November 3, 200
p2pnet newsfeeds for your site.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss
Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
