On the back of defending the agreement this week, Novell did as promised and published details of its landmark November 2006 Linux partnership agreements with Microsoft.

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.

Danger from the Deep is a free , open-source World War II German submarine simulator....

"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.

Microsoft is regretting the way it handled the patent protection deal with Novell and other Linux vendors, according to open-source advocates.

The deal has already stirred up open-source advocates. "If the strategy isn't to create uncertainty around Linux, it's hard to say what it is," said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation.

Alan Cox talks about cooperation with hardware vendors, patent law, microkernels, and GPLv3: "I think [the MS-Novell deal] is a bad idea and that Novell are going to get stung by the GPLv3, and rightfully so. The license is designed to keep the software free, if it fails to do this then it needs fixing, so GPLv3 hopefully will fix this flaw."

Danger from the Deep, an Open Source World War II german uboat simulation, striving for technical and historical accuracy, is now in its 0.3 incarnation. This latest version features a considerable amount of new features as well as tons of bug fixes. Amongst the new features, Dangerdeep now appears in full OpenGL2.0/GLSL1.1 goodness.

Microsoft denies that it has anything to do with GPLv3 or vice versa. Novell, however, is making it clear that it will be supporting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in the future, including any components, such as future versions of Samba, that are licensed under GPLv3.