All, On Saturday 07 August 2010 04:16:04 Vic wrote: > > In your (and other readers') personal opinion, is it good or bad > > that we are getting this kind of "PR"? > Overall - good.
Fully agreed. > There are still people who believe that GPL means "public domain". These > people need to be disabused of this erroneous belief. > At the same time, there are those that believe that GPL covers absolutely > everything in the aggregation. These people also need to be shown the > error of their ways. > Unfortunately, there are some who will only take away the message that > BusyBox has a legal risk to it. They conveniently forget that abusing the > licence of a proprietary piece of software is far more likely to land you > in legal difficulties... I would not have said it better than Vic did! :-) > > One important detail that the company which was violating GPL > > in this particular case is bankrupt at the moment; do we look bad > > by making its life even harder? - > We run the risk of looking irrelevant; it looks like a Pyhrric victory. As far as I understand, the company was not goinf bankrupt at the time the initial 'discussions' were started. > >> Westinghouse Digital Electronics was also ordered to hand over > >> equipment in its possession that contained GPL code > >> and forbidden to distribute devices which contained > >> the BusyBox software. > > Your thoughts? > We need to watch for web sites discussing this case, and be ready to > correct any flagrant nonsense in both articles and in comments. Some of > this will be ignorance, some astroturfing :-( The point being, that the stuff will be given to _charity_. And the $90,000 figure for _triple_ damages is not very high, if we compare that to damages granted for even non-wilfull infringement to proprietary stuff (although I do not have figures out of my head right now, we have to get one for, say MS or ScO, just to compare) The groklaw article is very interesting: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100803132055210 Regards, -- .-----------------.--------------------.------------------.--------------------. | Yann E. MORIN | Real-Time Embedded | /"\ ASCII RIBBON | Erics' conspiracy: | | +33 662 376 056 | Software Designer | \ / CAMPAIGN | ___ | | +33 223 225 172 `------------.-------: X AGAINST | \e/ There is no | | http://ymorin.is-a-geek.org/ | _/*\_ | / \ HTML MAIL | v conspiracy. | '------------------------------^-------^------------------^--------------------' _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list busybox@busybox.net http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
