Novell could be banned from selling Linux

Matthew Gillen me at mattgillen.net
Sun Feb 4 14:25:34 EST 2007


David Kramer wrote:
> That's motivation, not justification.  It's clear why the FSF (and the
> vast majority of the Open Source community) would not want Novell to
> partner with MSFT as they did, but the question remains, how is FSF
> going to block Novell from selling Linux, and what legal means will they
> use to enforce it.

IANAL, but my half-a$$ed understanding is that FSF can't block distribution
of some key parts of Linux (such as the kernel, apache, etc), even if they
are distributed under the GPL.  But they do own the copyrights (and can
therefore change the license at will) for a lot of user-space tools that
would make it pretty hard to build a usable system without.

Matt

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