14 DAY TRIAL // The Linux community will use the General Public License against the Microsoft and Novell agreement announced at the beginning of the November. The deal from which Novell got $348 million, while it paid Microsoft $40 million, protects the company's clients from patent violation lawsuits as the line of patent infringement was blurred by both Microsoft and Novell. In the following weeks, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer generalized the patent infringement allegations but also said that The Redmond Company is additionally opened to deals with other Linux distributors under similar conditions.
"Our strategy is to use GPL 3 against the deal - we're not going to vary that strategy. We're going to make the deal not tenable and we urge Microsoft to back away as gracefully and as quickly as possible from a deal that won't work," revealed the Free Software Foundation's attorney Eben Moglen.
An updated General Public License would contain protections against lawsuits generated by patent infringement. This would automatically take Microsoft out of the equation and make the Novell agreement and other similar deals useless.
"Our further strategy is to finish GPL 3 in a way which gives us, in the free world, what we must have, and which is otherwise respectful of the needs of people who use the free world's products in whatever legitimate way they do them. We believe agreement on all the major issues is now within reach. We're going to publish a last-call draft very soon, that will show agreement has been reached with most of the major parties on all the major issues, and now it's time to finish the license and put it in place, and get the benefit of the protection that it accords us - at a time when the protection is really needed," added Moglen.
Since the signing of the agreement, neither Microsoft nor Novell have been able to agree on the extent of patent infringement in their products.
"Suppose GPL3 says something like, 'if you distribute (or procure the distribution), of a program (or parts of a program) - and if you make patent promises partially to some subset of the distributees of the program - then under this license you have given the same promise or license at no cost in royalties or other obligations to all persons to whom the program is distributed'. If GPL 3 goes into effect with these terms in it, Novell will suddenly becomes a patent laundry; the minute Microsoft realizes the laundry is under construction it will withdraw," concluded Moglen.