Bradley M. Kuhn's Letter to the FOSS Development Community Regarding Microsoft's Patent Promise
Last Thursday, Novell and Microsoft announced a new collaborative effort involving both licensing and technology. The Software Freedom Law Center has been following the situation, and as its CTO …
Context & Ripple Effects
The letter lands a week after Novell and Microsoft announced their [[confirmed|licensing-and-technology]] collaboration, with Microsoft's 'patent promise' to customers as its most contested piece. It also follows more than a year of thawing between the company and open-source bodies — including Microsoft-OSI talks over Shared Source licenses in October 2005 — which makes Kuhn's warning read as a counterpoint to that rapprochement rather than an isolated objection.
Distribution tells the story of who cares: beyond the original posting on softwarefreedom.org, Groklaw picked up the letter the same week, putting the SFLC's legal argument directly in front of the developer audience it addresses.
First-order effects
- FOSS developers and distributors now have to parse exactly whose deployments Microsoft's patent covenant protects — Kuhn's letter argues the promise is structured around Novell customers, leaving everyone else outside the umbrella.
- Novell faces immediate scrutiny from the free-software community it sells to, with its Linux business's legitimacy among contributors now tied to defending the deal.
Second-order effects
- Other Linux distributors inherit a new sales objection — customers weighing whether buying from a vendor without a Microsoft pact carries unpriced patent risk — pressuring them either to seek similar bilateral terms or to visibly reject them.
- The dispute hands ammunition to the ongoing GPLv3 revision process, where how licenses treat patent-linked distribution deals becomes a live drafting question.
Third-order effects
- If bilateral patent covenants become the template, Linux risks splitting into a covered tier (vendors with Microsoft agreements) and an uncovered tier, shifting power from copyright licenses to whoever controls the patent peace treaties.
- A durable pattern would push free-software licenses to harden against patent-deal workarounds, making license text itself the next front in the Microsoft-open-source relationship.
The trend: Patent assurances bundled into commercial distribution deals are replacing code-level compatibility as the main battleground between Microsoft and the free-software ecosystem.