Microsoft tries to sidestep GPL 3
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Blog: Microsoft says selling Linux coupons doesn't constitute acceptance of the new General Public License, and those coupons won't include support for GPL 3 software.
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Between the lines The Free Software Foundation (FSF) appears to be polishing up its legal sabers over possible violations of the General Public License (GPL) by Microsoft.â¦
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European antitrust regulators worry that Microsoft could dominate the burgeoning market for digital rights management software
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(InfoWorld) - The Free Software Foundation has released the fourth or "last-call" draft of the third version of its GNU general public license, set a date for its official publication, and laid out reasons why the free and open source software community should adopt GPLv3 sooner rather than later. The GPL gives users the right to freely study, copy, modify, reuse, share, and redistribute software. Created by Richard Stallman in 1989 for the GNU free operating system project, the license was last fully revised 16 years ago as GPLv2. Besides releasing the fourth draft of GPLv3 on Thursday, the FSF also published an essay by Stallman extolling the benefits of moving from GPLv2 to GPLv3. The new license deals with issues that have emerged recently, notably the patent-licensing deal around Suse Linux struck between Novell and Microsoft in November. Parts of the Linux operating system including its kernel are licensed under GPLv2. Earlier this month, Microsoft executives created a firestorm of protest in the open source community when they asserted that Linux and other open source softwareÂ infringe on 235 of the software vendor's patents. "Microsoft made a fewÂ mistakes in the Novell-Microsoft deal, andÂ GPLv3 is designed to turn them against Microsoft, extending that limited patent protection to the whole community," Stallman wrote. "In order to take advantage of this, programs need to use GPLv3." Software distributors who make discriminatory patent deals after March 28, 2007, may not pass on to others software covered under GPLv3. Ultimately, the FSF would like to do away with software patents altogether but realizes that is currently impossible, aiming instead with GPLv3 to ensure free software can't be made proprietary through patents, according to Stallman. GPLv3 also deals with what Stallman terms "tivoization" or computers containing software covered by the license that can't be changed as well as DRM, or digital rights management, which the FSF prefers to call "digital restrictions management." "Freedom means _you_ control what your software does, not merely that you can beg or threaten someone else who decides for you," Stallman wrote. "GPLv3 ensures you are free to remove the handcuffs. It doesn't forbid DRM, or any kind of feature. ... Rather, it makes sure that you are just as free to remove nasty features as the distributor of your copy was to add them." The fourth GPLv3 draft draws on feedback the FSF received from the general public and official discussion committees on the previous draft that appeared in March. One of the key changes is around license compatibility between the GPL and open source licenses. In the new draft, GPLv3 is now compatible with version 2.0 of the Apache License. The license also supports BitTorrent and contains language to make it friendlier to an international audience. Previous drafts of GPLv3 were met with a mixed reception in the open source community. In particular, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, was highly critical of the first two drafts, butÂ mellower about the third draft. Like other developers, he's previously stated he prefers to stick with GPLv2. "GPL version 2 will remain a valid license, and no disaster will happen if some programs remain under GPLv2 while others advance to GPLv3," Stallman wrote. "These two licenses are incompatible, but that isn't a serious problem." By "incompatible," the FSF means that it sees no legal way to combine code licensed under GPLv2 with code under GPLv3. Such incompatibility is only an issue if developers want to link, merge, or combine code from programs licensed under GPLv2 and GPLv3. "There is no problem in having GPLv3-covered and GPLv2-covered programs side by side in an operating system," Stallman wrote. The FSF will take comments on the fourth draft for 29 days and plans to officially publish the final GPLv3 license on June 29. The fourth draft of GPLv3 and Stallman's essay are on the FSF's Web site atÂ gplv3.fsf.org.
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SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- Noting two evolving areas of software licensing, Microsoft is pondering how to license when multiple instances of an application are run on a single computer, but is not eyeing a plan for utility-based computing, in which charges are based on individual usage.
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Microsoft plans to block access to some features by unlicensed versions of OS.
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If Linus and the other key kernel developers were to back a shift to GPLv3, and if there were reasonable legal air cover from respected Open Source authorities for doing so, it seems unlikely that we'd see a substantive challenge to such a move.
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Microsoft Corp. continues to tweak its volume licensing programs to make it easier for business customers to purchase the company&#39;s software in bulk.
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MicrosoftWatch: The Redmond software firm is set to make available more of its code under an open-source license on Tuesday. Microsoft is preparing to release a third piece of code under an open-source license
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Microsoft is currently working on a fix for its Windows Media Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology as users have figured out a way to get around the copyright protection.
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Blog: For all its sound and fury, the third version of the General Public License has not had much impact on the industry yet. Very few projects have adopted it. Here's why.
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By Bill Husted, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution  Sep. 20--For the third time since June, Microsoft has filed lawsuits  against small metro area firms as it attempts to crack down on the sale of  unlicensed or counterfeit versions of its software.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft's defeat in a European appeals courtÂ Monday has left open-source developers hopeful about the future although still dissatisfied with the company's compliance with a 3-year-old antitrust ruling. The European Commission ordered Microsoft to license its workgroup server communications protocols to rivals in March 2004, aiming to make it easier for those companies to develop and sell enterprise software interoperating -- and competing -- with Microsoft's own products. So far, though, there have been few takers for the licenses Microsoft now proposes under its WSPP (Workgroup Server Protocol Program) -- and the licenses have proved useless to open-source developers. "It's been an abject failure in restoring competition," said Jeremy Allison, co-creator of the open-source workgroup file and print server software Samba. The Commission's ruling, against which Microsoft appealed in June 2004, came at the conclusion of a broader antitrust investigation in which the Commission found Microsoft had used its dominance in desktop operating systems to influence the markets for media players and workgroup server operating systems. Microsoft complied rapidly with other aspects of the ruling, paying a fine of â¬497 million (then $600 million) and appointing an independent monitoring trustee to oversee its compliance, but it dragged its heels on the protocols. Microsoft asked for clarification upon clarification of what the Commission wanted it to do, prompting the independent monitoring trustee appointed by the Commission to declare that the information Microsoft had provided by December 2005 was "useless." In July 2006, frustrated by the delays, the Commission fined Microsoft a further â¬280.5 million for failing to provide technical details of the communications protocols in a timely manner. Now that the European Court of First Instance has rejected Microsoft's appeal, the company must live with the WSPP, as it has lived for some years with a similar licensing plan, the MCPP (Microsoft Communications Protocol Program), set up following a U.S. Department of Justice ruling in another antitrust case. MCPP has its supporters: "It allowed us to innovate our products in ways we would not have been able to," said Michael Tennefoss, head of strategic marketing at Aruba Networks, adding that Microsoft's thorough documentation allowed the company to complete product development quickly. MCPP is essential to development efforts at Secure Computing, vice president of product management Scott Montgomery said. It has saved the company the expense of reverse-engineering the protocols used by Microsoft's server products to determine how to interoperate with them. Quantifying the cost of that reverse-engineering effort was difficult, said Montgomery, "But it would always come up orders of magnitude greater than the cost of buying the kit." However, he regretted that "Microsoft had to have a gun put to its head before it would disclose this information." Allison is skeptical of the innovation that MCPP's supporters say it enables: No one is using it to create products that compete head-on with core Microsoft technologies, such as Active Directory Domain Controllers, he said. The Samba project's developers can't benefit from either MCPP or its European counterpart WSPP because the licensing terms Microsoft imposes are incompatible with the way open-source and free software projects distribute their software, Allison said. Jean-Paul Smets, CEO of French open-source ERP vendor Nexedi, is pleased that the court has reaffirmed the Commission's ruling but fears that Microsoft will keep finding ways to make it difficult for companies like his to make use of information about its protocols. For Allison, though, the court's decision presents a fresh opportunity to influence the WSPP licenses and level the playing field. "We are going to be pushing very strongly for licenses compatible with open-source projects," he said. (With additional reporting by James Niccolai in Paris and Paul Meller in Brussels.)
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Document management company hopes license change will mean more outside programmer involvement.
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In what&#39;s being called a shrewd licensing move, Microsoft last week put its competitors on the defensive and avoided price increases for customers by announcing it would not charge extra fees for server software running on dual-core, processor-based
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Let the porting begin: Uploadr 3.0 is not only out of beta, it's also governed by the GPL now.
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Microsoft Corp., bowing to a court order sending shock waves through the personal computer industry, is readying an alternative version of its Windows operating