Alexander Terekhov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Doesn't anyone outside the academic legal community harbor > any suspicion that the GPL is broken? Eben Moglen has propounded > specious legal theories without ever citing relevant case, statute > or other legal authority supporting his stance on the validity > of the GPL and his claim that it is not a(n) (invalid) contract.
No idea about that, but I'd like to point out that the world is larger than just the US. A german court has stated that the GPL is valid in Germany, and that it is to be treated as a (valid) contract. Or rather as the "Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen"; if you go to a shop and buy something, not only the individual words you talk with the shopkeeper ("how much is that shirt?" "20 Euro" "Here you are") are part of the contract, but also a non-individual legalese text if it can plainly be seen at the cash desk, or if you are referred to it in an online-shop. The german original text is at http://www.jbb.de/urteil_lg_muenchen_gpl.pdf, an english translation at http://www.jbb.de/judgment_dc_munich_gpl.pdf Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX)