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“What has happened is, Microsoft has not given Novell a patent license, and thus, section 7 of GPL version 2 does not come into play,” he said. “Instead, Microsoft offered a patent licence that is rather limited to Novell's customers alone.”

“It turns out that perhaps it's a good thing that Microsoft did this now, because we discovered that the text we had written for GPL version 3 would not have blocked this, but it's not too late and we're going to make sure that when GPL version 3 really comes out it will block such deals,” he added.

“Now that we have seen this possibility, we're not going to have trouble drafting the language that will block it off,” Stallman said. “We're going to say not just that if you receive the patent license, but if you have arranged any sort of patent licensing that is prejudicial among the downstream recipients, that that's not allowed.”

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