On 25 Mar 2005 at 10:53, Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
At Thu, 24 Mar 2005 12:20:11 -0000, Niall Douglas wrote:
There's a part of me who would like to see the GPL fully tested in court with the FSF up against some very good corporate lawyers.
I said FULLY tested, in other words not a clear open & shut case of blatent license violation.
The GPL is already tested in court. See http://www.netfilter.org/news/2004-04-15-sitecom-gpl.html
This is the netfilters case, a famous and very blatent stealing of code.
I hadn't heard of this one before, but it's also a case of stealing of code.
In either, it was not so much the GPL itself which was being tested in court but rather general copyright law in that you can't just go take someone else's work and make it your own without permission. The fact it was the GPL as the license wasn't particularly important than any other license.
When I say fully tested, I mean for example some large company bundling GPL software with their proprietary system. Right now, companies such as MS won't even let a single GPL binary anywhere near their ISO's because of the legal uncertainty which surrounds the GPL - almost certainly, an aggregate of binaries doesn't invoke source disclosure but MS's lawyers will have advised them better safe than sorry. And that's a shame, because it's a pain in the ass for millions all over the world to have to go install various numerous addons to new installations of Windows which would be much handier if they came on the install CD (after all, we all don't have broadband internet yet!)
Cheers, Niall