Rjack wrote:
The renumeration they demand is contractual control of other's exclusive copyrights -- which is clearly illegal.
You are, as usual, wrong. Copyright holders of GPLed software require, in order for permission to copy and distribute to be granted, that recipients of such distribution inherit the same freedoms in the software that the distributors have - the right to run, read, modify, and share the software. The distributors have the completely free choice of distributing or not, but the only rights they have to the GPLed software is what the rights holders will grant them. If they don't like the terms, they need not distribute the software. The terms of the GPL are plainly not illegal. Alexander Terekhov helpfully provided a link to a US court ruling which demonstrates this: <http://pacer.mad.uscourts.gov/dc/opinions/saris/pdf/progress%20software.pdf> With respect to the General Public License (“GPL”), MySQL has not demonstrated a substantial likelihood of success on the merits or irreparable harm. Affidavits submitted by the parties’ experts raise a factual dispute concerning whether the Gemini program is a derivative or an independent and separate work under GPL ¶ 2. After hearing, MySQL seems to have the better argument here, but the matter is one of fair dispute. Moreover, I am not persuaded based on this record that the release of the Gemini source code in July 2001 didn’t cure the breach. As you can see, the judge has read the GPL and understands that the parties may have legitimate disputes about whether and how it was properly followed, but she gives no indication that she finds anything wrong with the license as a whole. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
