Being compliant with the GPL was obviously a massively important part of doing this, and it’s something we’ve been working on for a long time, Bill Hilf, Microsoft’s general manager of platform strategy, told Computer Business Review.
Hilf denied suggestions that the patent peace deal struck by Microsoft and Novell was in breach of the GPL under which Linux is licensed. We won’t be licensing patents at all but what we will do is grant a covenant to them. There is no language where a license is given.
As part of a broad deal announced by Microsoft and Novell last week, the company’s agreed not to assert their intellectual property rights against each other’s customers, giving Novell SUSE Linux developers and customers the knowledge that Microsoft would not come after them for patent infringement.
The Free Software Foundation’s general counsel, Eben Moglen, has speculated as to whether the deal could violate section seven of the GPL, arguing that an agreement that requires royalty payments for the right to distribute GPL software cannot be distributed under the GPL.
Despite the royalty payment agreements between Microsoft and Novell, Hilf maintained that Microsoft and Novell’s lawyers were convinced no violation had occurred because the two were not cross-licensing IP, but merely have agreed not to sue each other over IP.
Microsoft and Novell are working on a document designed to clarify their agreement with regards to the GPL.
If they are right, the deal could split the Linux industry between Novell, which enjoys Microsoft’s patent protection, and the rest, but Hilf maintained the company was interested in similar deals with other Linux and open source vendors.
In announcing the deal Microsoft’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, suggested the company had taken part in similar discussions with Red Hat Inc, although Red Hat is clearly not interested, having called the deal an innovation tax and unthinkable.
Microsoft also agreed not to press intellectual property claims against open source developers, but only if they are not employed to do their development work, or are paid to develop for the opensuse project, which excludes the majority of Linux developers.
It does separate the open source developer who’s doing it for a love of technology from those who are getting paid for it, said Hilf, admitting he did know the implications for Linus Torvalds, who is sponsored by the non-profit Open Source Development Labs, enabling him to work on the Linux kernel full-time.
While Torvalds is clearly being paid to work on Linux, it could also be argued that he is acting in an individual non-commercial way in the words of Microsoft’s general counsel, Brad Smith.
In the meantime, Hilf maintained that the open source model meant that Microsoft had little choice but to deal with open source software vendors on an individual basis. It already has interoperability deals in place with JBoss (now part of Red Hat), SugarCRM, and Zend.
