The release of the General Public License 3, was intended to strengthen open source against patents claims. Microsoft's deal with Novell, selling vouchers that indemnify SUSE customers from any Microsoft patent claims, prompted the changes in the GPL. Novell's announcement that new code would be GPL3 left Microsoft with little choice but to dance the quickstep. The first part of the announcement [1] states that Microsoft is not a party to GPL3. The second part states that the vouchers will not apply to GPL3 code, thereby effectively discontinuing the vouchers for new code. Seems like the GPL3 is doing exactly what it was meant to do: stop patent holders from fracturing open source through exclusive agreements.