Companies should not fall for the temptations of purchasing a licence for
Microsoft's
intellectual property with their open source applications because it allows the
software giant to "divide and conquer" the software market.
The comments were made by Eben Moglen, co-author of the forthcoming third
version of the General Public Licence (GPL) and founder of the
Software
Freedom Law Center.
Typifying open source applications as community software, Moglen argued that
it requires a communal defence against patents from companies like Microsoft.
But Moglen told
vnunet.com
in a
video
interview that some in the community will be tempted to make a "private
peace with the invader".
"Divide-and-conquer strategies are built around the weakness that it is in
the interest of some people to make a private deal for safety and abandon
communal defence," Moglen said.
"We are trying to prevent a divide-and-conquer strategy from working. So it
is important for us to say to people that they have to stick to the common
defence.
"They cannot make private deals with the invader or the adversaries of the
freedom of the software. We all have to stick together."
Microsoft and
Novell
unveiled a
partnership
in October that provides buyers of Novell's SuSE Linux operating system with a
licence for Microsoft's patent portfolio, safeguarding them from intellectual
property infringement claims.
Contrary to common patent licensing agreements, the licence is granted to the
individual user rather than to Novell. The deal met with
harsh
criticism from open source advocates including Moglen.
Enterprises have been less critical about the partnership, however. Microsoft
and Novell have signed several customers for their combined offering, and have
published a survey which claims strong approval of the partnership.
Moglen recommended that Novell should engage in cross-licensing deals instead
of providing patent licences to individual Novell customers.
But Microsoft does not want to engage in a cross-licence deal on Linux. The
terms of the GPL require that a patent pledge to Novell is extended to all Linux
distributions.
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