
Stafford Masie: Novell Will Be GPL3 Compliant
Date: Wednesday, December 27 2006 @ 00:07:01 EST Topic: Bull!!
Stafford Masie, Novell South Africa country manager, assured attendees
of the CITI forum that "we (Novell) will be GPLv3 compliant, trust me",
including changing the Microsoft-Novell deal if necessary, and they
will "do what's right".
Here is some from Stafford Masie’s presentation at the recent CITI forum.
According to Masie, Novell will alter their agreement with Microsoft,
if necessary (and it makes ‘business sense’), in order to be compliant
with the upcoming GNU General Public License version 3.
Now, people say, you already violate GPL version 3, no we dont because GPL version 3 is not there yet.
And,
it is a good thing that GPL 3 is being discussed so extensively right
now, because we are participants in that entire authoring. Y’know we
talk to Stallman, and we talk to Barrett and all these people that are
authors of GPL version 3, and we’ll continue to do that.
Now, as
GPL version 3 matures, and Stallman has said we’re not in violation of
GPL version 2 at the moment, now we’re not with the current agreement,
but he believes in GPL3 he will put verbiage in there to ensure that we
are.
Y’know, he wants to ensure that its not just patents that
you’ve bought that will violate GPL v3 if you own them, that agreement,
but the fact that an agreement like this is in place that downstream
affects people… that utilize your distribution makes you in violation
of GPL version 3, so we’re working very closely on the authoring of
that, we will be GPL V3 compliant, trust me, we will,ok?
Will we
have to alter our agreement with Microsoft to ensure that it happens?
We will, we’ll do what’s right. We’ll participate, and yeah we’ll do
what it takes, but its gonna be a collaborative effort.
We’ll
talk to the GPL version 3 authors… like we are right now, I think
common sense will prevail, because at the end of the day we actually do
benefit the community being here, we do benefit, its not… it doesn’t
make sense to vindictively come after some of these agreements, there’s
got to be a reason behind it, and we’ll listen to that reason, and
we’ll concede where we need to concede and where it makes business
sense, thats always been our stance.
so, GPL v2 according to Stallman, we do not, y’know we dont infringe on the GPL2 whatsoever with this current agreement.
BoycottNovell.com
has lots more coverage from Stafford Masie’s presentation, including
what Novell considers their role to be within the ‘community’, how
Novell wants to be considered the "800lb. Penguin" (alongside IBM), how
Enterprise customers don’t like indemnity, and more…
The full
transcript of Masie’s presentation will be posted soon, or at least the
full transcript of the OGG, it cuts off early when it was about to get
interesting and is a little bit of a disappointment. Anyone in
attendance that has a full recording, please contact me.
Also, check out the transcript of the Q&A session for more from Stafford Masie on Microvell and Software Patents.
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