Feature Article By Jeff Gould
Copyright © 2007, Peerstone Research Inc, All rights reserved.

February 19, 2007
The headline of this post is tongue-in-cheek (but of course you knew that already, right?). Reuters, to the best of my knowledge, has not been banned from reporting. Although based on some of their recent work, they should be.

Seriously, you have to wonder what they have been smoking over there, after reading a headline like this:

"Novell could be banned from selling Linux--group"
The article in question was published by Reuters on February 2, and the "group" referred to is the Free Software Foundation. Here is the opening sentence:

"The Free Software Foundation is reviewing Novell Inc.'s right to sell new versions of Linux operating system software after the open-source community criticized Novell for teaming up with Microsoft Corp."
The author of the article would have us believe that there is a serious possibility Novell could be forced to withdraw from the Linux market as punishment for its highly unpopular deal with Microsoft. And furthermore, this amazing turn of events could occur as early as next month if the all-powerful FSF so decrees. Wow! The reporter goes on to imply that even though Linux produced only 5% of Novell's revenue last year, such a change in plans could hurt Novell's stock price. I'll bet it could. I'll also bet it could make Steve Ballmer feel more than a little strange about the $240 million he just forked over to Novell for the right to distribute 350,000 copies of Suse Linux over the next five years.

The Reuters headline is of course is completely and utterly wrong. Novell is not going to be forced to stop selling Linux. Well, never say never. Maybe aliens will descend on Waltham Mass., kidnap the company's staff and fly them away to another planet. But barring that, Novell is going to be a Linux player for many years to come. If not, I'll eat my hat. The Reuters article doesn't merely brush up against the line of journalistic malpractice. No, it jumps right over the line and dives headfirst into a steaming pit of abject nonsense.

But how on earth, you may well ask, did the reporter ever manage to fall into such a delusion in the first place? Well, that is a tale of a confusion wrapped around a nugget of truth piled on top of a misapprehension.

First, the confusion. If you take the headline at face value (and it would be odd if Reuters intended its headlines to be taken figuratively), it appears that the reporter has confused the GPL license under which Linux is licensed with Linux itself. Instead of saying that Novell could be "banned from selling Linux", what he should have said is:

"Novell's recent patent arrangement with Microsoft may make it difficult for the company to adopt the new version of the GPL that has been proposed by the FSF (but which has already been rejected by key members of the open source community and which the FSF has no power to impose unilaterally)"
Not quite as catchy, but miles closer to the truth. What the reporter has done here is akin to confusing your driver's license with your car. One fits in your wallet, the other goes in your garage. The Free Software Foundation has the self-appointed duty of producing the next version of the GPL, true enough. And by controlling the content of that version it can obviously influence which companies and software projects will want to adopt it.

But the FSF simply has no power to ban anyone from selling Linux itself, because it does not own the intellectual property rights to Linux. The copyrights to the Linux kernel source code are owned by the countless programmers who have contributed to it over the years, including but certainly not limited to Linus Torvalds. In fact, not even these copyright holders can ban someone from selling Linux. Because they have chosen to license their work under the 16 year-old GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2), the most they can do is sue someone who violates the terms of that license. But they cannot change the license itself, no more than its original author can, FSF's own Richard Stallman.

Now for the nugget of truth. The FSF doesn't like the Novell-Microsoft deal, and would love to kill it if they could. But of course they know they can't, because as Stallman and FSF's Eben Moglen have acknowledged, the indirect "I promise not to sue your customers" patent protection that Microsoft has granted Novell, ugly as it may be, doesn't violate the terms of GPLv2. That's why Stallman and Moglen have hinted they will make last minute changes to the controversial new version 3 of the GPL they have been struggling to promote for over a year. So Reuters is perfectly correct to suggest that software distributed under the future GPLv3 most likely will not allow arrangements such as the one Novell and Microsoft have made.

But here we come to the misapprehension or – to put it more bluntly – the most abjectly wrong part of the Reuters story. What the FSF thinks of the Novell-Microsoft deal, and whatever changes they may or may not make to the GPLv3, are utterly irrelevant to Novell's legal right to sell Linux, now or in the future. The reason is that Linux is not going to migrate from GPLv2 to GPLv3. A group of key kernel contributors, led by Linus himself, have declared that they are irrevocably opposed to the GPLv3 and have no intention of allowing their code to shift to the new license. Since they as the copyright holders are the only ones who have any say in the matter, that's the end of it. The GPLv3 is dead on arrival, and everyone knows it. (For a discussion of why the kernel contributors rejected the GPLv3, see "Is GPLv3 just a load of 'crap, crap, crap'?" and "Can Stallman force a Linux fork?".)

There you have it. One of the leading news-gathering organizations of the world has demonstrated a mind-boggling inability to get its basic facts straight (apparently not for the first time). If the Reuters reporter had been the least bit interested in the truth, he might have first spent 5 or 10 minutes rooting around on Google, which would have been sufficient to uncover the fact that there is no story here.

Instead, he went for the sensational headline, and ended up inventing a story from whole cloth. He mistook the GPL for the software, and then he got the wrong GPL. That isn't just confusing your driver's license with your car. That's confusing your license with my car. Reuters, out of my garage, please!