FSF says GPLv3 means Microsoft patent protection for all
Microsoft's covenant not to sue users of Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise will be extended to all General Public License v3 users as soon as Novell includes GPLv3 code within its Linux distribution, according to the Free Software Foundation.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the collision the GPLv3 process has been building toward since the third draft in March: the Free Software Foundation wrote anti-discrimination clauses into the license specifically aimed at deals like the one Microsoft signed with Novell, whose terms Novell agreed to detail publicly last month. The FSF's position now is that the covenant cannot stay private — the moment Novell distributes GPLv3 code under SUSE, the license itself forces Microsoft's no-sue promise onto every GPLv3 user.
The timing matters because eWEEK reported days ago that the final draft provisions looked 'good for Novell customers' — and because Microsoft has just been widening this playbook beyond Novell, with a confirmed five-year technical and legal collaboration with Linux distributor Xandros announced as part of an ongoing program of open-source partnerships.
First-order effects
- Novell now faces a fork: ship GPLv3 code in SUSE Linux Enterprise and its customers' Microsoft patent protection becomes universal, or hold the distribution back from GPLv3 and forfeit the license's legal improvements.
- The FSF converts a commercial negotiation between two vendors into a licensing question answerable by anyone who reads the GPL text — Microsoft's covenant stops being a contract it controls exclusively.
Second-order effects
- Xandros and any future Microsoft-Linux partner are repriced by the same mechanism: if their distributions carry GPLv3 code, the exclusivity Microsoft paid for leaks out through the license rather than the contract.
- Other Linux distributors gain a route to patent protection they never negotiated for, shifting the competitive field toward whichever distributions adopt GPLv3 first.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, per-vendor patent covenants become structurally unstable as a business model — license terms, not bilateral agreements, become the enforcement surface where IP protection gets distributed.
- It points toward free-software licenses being used deliberately as policy instruments, with each major license revision engineered to reshape specific commercial deals.
The trend: Copyleft license drafting is emerging as the counter-lever to vendor patent-licensing deals, turning individual commercial agreements into broadly shared protections.