On Aug 16, 4:31 pm, Linonut <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > * Rjack peremptorily fired off this memo: > > > My dream is that Eben, RMS, and all GPL true believers read and > > understand this decision so that we need never again hear the > > nonsense claim that "The GPL is a license and not a contract".
Technically, a contract has conditions for termination. There is a point at which the contract is satisfied and there terms no longer need to be honored. A Copyright license is very much LIKE a contract, and it is as legally binding as a contract, however, there aren't a set of conditions that fulfill the contract at which point it is no longer necessary to honor the terms and conditions of the license. Nullification of copyright license would cause a HUGE problem for all copyright holders, because it would create chaos and confusion over what could and could not make a license valid. Microsoft's control over it's copyrights could have been destroyed by the ruling as it stood. The same law that makes it possible for Microsoft to publish source code and maintain control of that code under the terms of a copyright license, or even binary code under the control of a license, is the same law that gives Richard Stallman the right to control the use of his code through his copyright license. The consideration that makes the license legally binding is the use of the copyrighted work. The exchange of cash is secondary. That is merely another condition of the license. The key difference between a license and a contract is that no ownership is transferred to the licensee. This is not a purchase, or a transfer of title, where the legal obligation ends once the terms of the contract have been satisfied. A license remains legally binding so long as the license is in force. If the license is revoked or terminated, the right to use the copyrighted work is terminated with it. The license can remain in force until the copyright expires or until it is terminated by one or both parties. It's very similar to the terms of a driver's license, or a radio license, or any government issued license. Your grant of the license is contingent on your willingness to abide by the terms of that license. If you violate the terms of that license, the license can be revoked. Keep in mind that the judge in the district court made no attempt to nullify the validity of the license itself, but instead attempted to claim that the terms of the license was unclear. Ironically, this also would have been an unacceptable threat to copyright holders, since the GNU license is probably one of the simpler licenses. The law assumes that you are old enough to commit to a legal agreement, and that you are responsible for understanding the terms of the license. If you are not sure you understand the terms of a license, you should get a competent attorney to explain the full consequences of the license agreement. The "flip side" of a license is that it can be terminated at any time. If you stop using the software and remove any copies, then you are no longer bound by the terms of the license. In theory, even the nondisclosure terms is restricted to your use of copies of the software. Anything that you remember residually once you have destroyed or returned the originals is probably not covered by the agreement since you've terminated it. > >http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/88/88.F3d.1012.95-5125.95-51... \> The good faith usage of the GPL has been going on for a couple decades > now, and has resulted in a large body of software being available to > millions of people. That's correct. The first drafts of the GPL were drafted in 1984, by a number of subscribers to the net.legal newsgroup. I was one of about 50 involved in the discussion and played a minor role. Since I was a corporate employee and this was personal interest, I asked that my name NOT be included in the credits. It was originally called the General Public License, but with the creation of the GNU project, the name was changed to the GNU Public License. > A conflict with business was inevitable, but, in > the highest-profile case so far, IBM vs SCO, the plaintiff kind of let > the GPL angle drop. Actually, the conflict started, and ended, about 22 years ago, with the GNU project. Many of the original authors of BSD code had seen their cold transferred to AT&T with no consideration from AT&T. Many of those early contributors contributed their source code to GNU out of spite for AT&T. The irony is that the GNU code began to quickly evolve and many people contributed to the GNU code, and refused to license their enhancements to AT&T for resale in their proprietary code. Many of the early contributors to Linux had been working on the HURD project, and when Linus contributed his little kernel under the terms of the GPL, claiming that his 10,000 lines of code were all original code, it was more than enough to cause many GNU developers to start adding enhancements to the Linux kernel. And to the frustration of many UNIX vendors, they refused to publish these enhancements under more permissive licenses such as the BSD license. This is one of the reasons why Linux has better driver and hardware support, as well as numerous performance enhancements to the kernel. The fundamental flaw in the SCO case was that McBride asserted that EVERY line of UNIX could ONLY have originated from AT&T or Xenix source code, and that it could ONLY have originated from the proprietary licensed version of the AT&T Kernel. McBride deliberately chose to withhold most of the history of UNIX, or perhaps he didn't know it. Prior to proprietary versions of Linux AT&T had published several "unlicensed" (Pre-1976) versions of UNIX, and had contributed them to universities and colleges for "educational purposes" with no restrictions on the use (because at the time, copyright law did not cover code compiled from copyrighted source code.). The last of these "unrestricted" versions was AT&T Version 6, which was copyrighted in 1976. AT&T was not allowed to "Sell" UNIX until after divestature in 1983. Their first product, AT&T System III was so lacking in features compared to BSD 2.4 or BSD 4.0 that AT&T eventually negotiated a license for BSD UNIX from the University of Berkeley and released the merged code as AT&T System V. Released System Vr4 was the merge of all of the BSD 4.2 libraries, APIs, and applications, including Curses, VI, Sockets, and several other BSD specific features and applications. The Irony is that by not asserting the role of BSD, SCO violated the terms of the BSD license itself. In theory, anyone who contributed BSD source in the 1980s or 1990s could revoke SCO's right to use that code, since SCO attempted to claim ownership of code that had been licensed to them on the terms that required them to acknowledge the original authors and BSD. Other licenses violated by SCO included the licenses to X11, GNU, and Athena, including SGML, HTML, and XML. The irony is that most of the code that IBM did not request to have dismissed, was code that was created, owned, or funded by IBM (Including Athena and X11). _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
