"Microsoft cleared the air July 5 on its obligations to GNU General Public License Version 3 support, declaring it will not provide support or updates for GPLv3 under the deal it penned in November with Novell to administer certificates for the Linux distribution."

Microsoft’s current position, taken unilaterally, is intended to eliminate any perceived ambiguity about the applicability of GPLv3 to Microsoft.

In version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3), the term "the Program" means one particular work that is licensed under GPLv3 and is received by a particular licensee from an upstream licensor or distributor. The Program is the particular work of software that you received in a given instance of GPLv3 licensing, as you received it.

"The Program" cannot mean "all the works ever licensed under GPLv3"; that interpretation makes no sense, because "the Program" is singular: those many different programs do not constitute one program.

In particular, this applies to the clause in section 10, paragraph 3 of GPLv3 which states

In part 4 of a 5 part series on the new version of the most commonly used free/open source license, today we take a look at one of the reasons it took so long to create–the Microsoft/Novell patent deal.

"Novell will continue to ship the complete version of its Linux enterprise server even though Microsoft is attempting to distance itself legally from the new General Public License (GPL) v3 open source license."

The sale of free software on Windows Phone Marketplace has been stopped by Microsoft, which has barred applications licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 (GPLv3), Affero GPLv3, and LGPLv3 from its marketplace.

"The news of Silverlight 1.0 being released allows some insight in the way that Microsoft will work with GPLv3...In simple terms, Microsoft will not work with GPLv3. That is the line that they have drawn, and their rhetoric and actions now show this to be so..."

"Microsoft made a few mistakes in the Novell-Microsoft deal, and GPLv3 is designed to turn them against Microsoft, extending that limited patent protection to the whole community," explains GPLv3 co-author Richard M. Stallman.

"For all that a great deal of attention was given to the arrival of the GPLv3 (Gnu General Public License, version 3), few software developers announced plans to move their programs to this new license. Now, open-source programmers are beginning to give the new license a try."