> It becomes more complex than that, if Sun were to take a patent license on > such GPL'd (VLC) > code and then sell the product the next person would not be able to pass > along those GPL > "freedoms" which would be in violation of the GPL....
You are reading way too much into what I'm saying. I never said Sun should patent any open source projects. I just said they should add branding, support and codecs to a media player and sell it to Solaris users (such as myself) to make a little quick cash. It is 100% perfectly legal to SELL people products that are based on GPL'ed code. Red Hat Linux bases their entire business model on selling people binary distributions of GPL'ed code and if Red Hat can sell people a branded version of Linux called "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" that is really not all that much different from CentOS other than it has pictures of little red hats on it, then Sun could sell people a branded version of an open source media player if they wanted to. Sun has already released a branded version of GNOME called "Java Desktop System", so why not a branded version of VLC called "Java Media Player". Makes perfect sense to me. Richard Stallman said himself that there is nothing wrong with selling someone a binary product distribution made out of bundled up GPL'ed code. The only restriction with the GPL is that Sun would have to give the source code any changes they made to the GPL project back to the community, and in my experience Sun should have no problem with doing this as they are historically one of the #1 contributors of open source code (in terms of sheer quantity of code shared with the community). If you look at how much code Sun has shared, they are up there with other top contributors such as the Regents of UC Berkeley and GNU / FSF. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
