David Kastrup wrote: > > Alexander Terekhov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > Hey dak, groklaw crowd is loudly complaining about "Horrible > > interpretation of the GPL" by EASTERBROOK. > > > > What's your take on that? > > I did not bother with the details of what was an open-and-shut case, > anyway. And IIRC, Easterbrook did not too much, either. His job was > not to interpret the GPL, but ...
But he did. ---------- Before EASTERBROOK, KANNE, and EVANS, Circuit Judges. EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge. Does the provision of copyrighted software under the GNU General Public License (GPL) violate the federal antitrust laws? Authors who distribute their works under this license, devised by the Free Software Foundation, Inc., authorize not only copying but also the creation of derivative worksand the license prohibits charging for the derivative work. People may make and distribute derivative works if and only if they come under the same license terms as the original work. Thus the GPL propagates from user to user and revision to revision: neither the original author, nor any creator of a revised or improved version, may charge for the software or allow any successor to charge. Copyright law, usually the basis of limiting reproduction in order to collect a fee, ensures that open-source software remains free: any attempt to sell a derivative work will violate the copyright laws, even if the improver has not accepted the GPL. The Free Software Foundation calls the result copyleft. ---------- And then compared it to "a flourishing market in legal treatises and other materials, plus reference databases such as LEXIS and Westlaw, even though courts give away their work (this opinion, for example, is not covered by copyright and may be downloaded from the courts web site and copied without charge). And so it is with operating systems." Now tell me with a straight face that he wasn't drunken (i.e. moronized by the RMS' pseudo legal writing known as the GNU GPL). Can you? regards, alexander. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
