Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Novell and the GPL V3 Poison Pawn

September 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Novell and the GPL V3 Poison Pawn

TAGS: Open Source

This morning I read through an interesting translation of a 10 question written interview between members of the Brazilian Linux Community and Novell. Of course there are some revealing tidbits about Mono and ODF (two areas of strange attraction between Novell and Microsoft), but I found the following quote of particular interest:

Which are Novell adoption plans regarding GPLv3? (Knux) Would Novell adopt the GPLv3 licensing in any of its software? What are the reasons? (semente)

Novell welcomes the completion of GPLv3. We fully expect to include GPLv3 technologies in our future SUSE Linux Enterprise distributions. Our main focus in on getting the best technology into the hands of customers. We expect open source projects to be licensed under a combination of licenses, as they are today. GPLv3 will be one of those licenses. So as open source technologies get licensed under GPLv3, and introduced into SUSE Linux Enterprise, we will be meeting the requirements of that license.

Maybe I'm reading between the lines a bit, but this sounds as though Novell would rather "incorporate" GPL3 code provided by 3rd party developers within what may remain a GPL V2 SUSE kernel. No Poison Pawn there. Regardless, some would have us think thatNovell is doing well, walking this tightrope between the open source community and Microsoftdom. We'll have to wait to see how it plays out for SUSE and the GPL over the long haul, of course. Maybe Microsoft is the poison pawn for Novell rather than GPL V3.

Posted by Brad Shimmin on September 28, 2007 11:45 AM

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