Hello Allen,
Le 5 févr. 08 à 19:36, Allen Pulsifer a écrit :
Sure - so (it seems to me) rather hard for anyone except Sun to
prosecute an LGPL violation here -
Indeed, they're the copyright holder of the entirety of the code.
Redmond. In short, criticzing the JCA may be valid, but it's
particularly unappropriate - or perhaps just pathetic- coming
from you.
Charles,
That comment is way out of bounds. It is very appropriate for
Michael to
comment on this.
Michael's point is this: under the JCA, Novell is the JOINT holder of
copyright in all of their contributions to OpenOffice.org. Novell
could
INDEPENDENTLY assert a copyright violation claim against Butler
Office Pro
for violating Novell's copyright to Novell's contributions.
The problem that Michael is pointing out is that under the JCA, Sun
has the
right to license Novell's contributions to anyone they want under
any terms
they want. This means that Sun could simply settle Novell's copyright
violation claims against Butler Office behind Novell's back, without
Novell's permission, by offering Butler Office a license to Novell's
contributions.
I think that is the point of Michael's post,
So do I.
and it is a very valid point.
Even though Novell holds joint copyright to their contributions
under the
JCA, they have essentially surrendering their right to assert
copyright
violations.
And so did we all. I have two comments about this though: the practice
of copyright umbrella (call it JCA or SCA or anything else) is
widespread in FOSS project. OpenOffice.org is by no way an exception
Sun does it, Mozilla does it, Gnome does it, Novell does it, IBM does
it I think. This approach has benefits and drawbacks (mainly the ones
Michael and you summarized). But what matters at least as much in a
conversation is who speaks, and who speaks what words. I am quite
"amused" -to put things very mildly - to see somebody from Novell make
this kind of arguments. Novell does the same thing, and even worse:
Notoriously, disrupting OpenOffice.org's image to the benefit of its
own version in the press and to customers and prospects (which is not
very constructive) and creating interesting legal situations both of
the whole GNU/Linux stack and OpenOffice.org. I'm talking specific
legal agreements on "IP protection" from Microsoft made to specific
corporate customers. That they do. So I find it quite wild to have
somebody from Novell lecturing us about JCA. It might be wiser to look
back at one's own business.
Cheers,
Charles.
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