Hi John,
We have been down this road before. Here is a reply from the FSF:
*From: Donald R Robertson III via RT [mailto:licens...@fsf.org]*
*Sent: Monday, March 16, 2009 5:47 PM*
*
*
*Hello,*
*
*
*Thank you for your interest. This link:*
*http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-violation.html provides a*
*walk-through on what to do if you suspect that the GPL has been*
*violated. In short, you should double check to make sure that a*
*violation has occurred, and then notify the copyright holder on the*
*work. If you have a specific question about whether something is a*
*violation or not, please let us know. We here at licens...@fsf.org deal*
*with these sorts of issues frequently, and can often provide useful*
*information in determining whether a violation has occurred. Thanks so*
*much for your time, and I hope this helps.*
It boils down to a requirement that we first find a specific license
violation. The FSF can then take a look at that specific situation and
weigh in with their expertise to tell us if we do indeed have a legitimate
violation or not. The FSF has plenty to do without jumping into every
little squabble or helping us fish around and try to do research and dig up
a new violation that hasn't been spotted already.
We have had these threads of conversation before, and it all seems to end
when no one can pin point an actual provable license violation. It's not
good enough if the behavior stinks, it's not good enough if we don't like
it, it's not good enough if we are sure there must be a violation somewhere.
Seriously, I don't think any lawyer would be excited about jumping into the
middle of our squabbles to try to dig up some hidden technicality that only
a lawyer could spot so that we could push forward with legal action. That
is the realm of political campaigns or people with way too much free time
(or free money) on their hands. Certainly we can't afford to pay a lawyer
to research the GPL license and become an expert in that, then research the
FlightGear project and become an expert in that, and then research FPS and
become an expert in that ... and then expect that they will be able to find
some actual violation once they have become a thorough expert on the entire
landscape. Do we expect there is some magic lawyer dust that can be
sprinkled on the situation and that will produce some obscure technical
violation that no one else has been able to spot before?
In order to proceed with legal action, we need to identify a clear and
obvious violation of our license terms. So far we have not been able to
clear this first hurdle.
I don't disagree that FPS is a frustrating problem, but to proceed with a
legal remedy we need to identify a clear violation. In the mean time, I
agree with and support those that suggest that our best course of action is
to shine brighter than the lowlife scum. We could certainly do more to
promote FlightGear ourselves ... on web sites, on facebook, magazine
reviews, blogs, forums, youtube, etc. It would be nice to have a person (or
team) who focuses their full time effort on FlightGear marketing. It would
be nice if that person (or team) was really savvy and smart with marketing,
not just a warm body.
Please just keep this all in perspective. We've looked at this situation
several times already. We've contacted the FSF in the past. The ball is in
our court to identify a clear violation of our license. If we can't do
that, then let's just suck it up and decide to be positive about what we are
doing and not worry too much about a few bad apples floating around out
there that we can't control anyway.
Best regards,
Curt.
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 10:28 AM, J. Holden <stattosoftw...@yahoo.com>wrote:
> For the love of...
>
> Whatever your opinion on the legality of what they are doing, this is
> indeed a problem and reflects negatively on the community.
>
> Ignoring it will not make it go away. We need to know what we can do.
>
> Please, please, someone with a copyright interest in the software please
> contact the lawyers at http://www.softwarefreedom.org/
>
> I am not saying this for fun.
>
> Cheers
> John
>
>
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--
Curtis Olson:
http://www.atiak.com - http://aem.umn.edu/~uav/
http://www.flightgear.org -
http://www.flightgear.org/blogs/category/curt/<http://www.flightgear.org/blogs/category/personal/curt/>
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Centralized Desktop Delivery: Dell and VMware Reference Architecture
Simplifying enterprise desktop deployment and management using
Dell EqualLogic storage and VMware View: A highly scalable, end-to-end
client virtualization framework. Read more!
http://p.sf.net/sfu/dell-eql-dev2dev
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