Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote: > [...] > You both are very welcome to offer insurance against legal claims > by kernel developers. The money you'll maybe lose will be your own. > I bet there will be many people who want to offload the risk on you. > > Please be warned that as soon as you offer such an insurance, certain > jurisdictions require copyright holders to sue those who infringe on > their copyrights to keep the copyrights enforceable. So that insurance > idea will probably die after the first court case. But again, you are > very welcome to try.
Chaps, I say this only once, so please listen carefully: this is a mailing list which means discussions usually take place on the list. Stop sending private copies of emails going to this list - there is absolutely no reason why I (or others) should be interested in receiving all emails twice! Use the list-reply functionality of your MUA or change the To/Cc headers manually if necessary. If you are not able or not willing to do that then maybe you should not participate any discussion on mailing lists and/or you should certainly not reply to my emails. Thanks a lot for your understanding. Now back to the actual topic: I am not interested in your strange story about insurances or any other story - actually, I am not even sure what you tried to tell us. I am mainly interested in the legal truth whether closed-source third-party drivers are violating the GPL license. Here, I don't have to show or prove anything - in any proper jurisdiction, the accuser has to provide the evidence and has to prove that others brake the law. A court will pick up those arguments and interpret the law and decide whether the accuser is right or wrong. So it's up to those kernel developers to provide the evidence that closed-source drivers are violating the GPL. They have a point, no doubt about that, but they haven't really provided the evidence and they haven't sued any company so far although there are companies out there that create and distribute closed-source kernel modules (see also the Debian argument later on). Instead, they seem to create what Siegbert called "social pressure". This is far more efficient for them as there is no risk of losing money at the court, or even the whole lawsuit (which might be unlikely but you never know). You're actively supporting this "social pressure" issue because it suits your opinion. Although I am also preferring open-source drivers (and you should really note this statement because we're actually sitting in the same boat), I am not willing to get them at all costs and I am not assuming that the kernel developers are right per se. As long as there is no proof that those drivers violate the GPL, I assume that those drivers are indeed in compliance with the law. Again, this is how cases are usually handled in jurisdiction as long as they are open or in doubt. If Andreas is indeed right and Debian is violating the GPL license "but nobody will do anything about it because it is the free community-based Linux distro" (quoting Andreas' email), then this is the strongest argument that those kernel developers (and others) threatening to sue companies don't primarily care about right or wrong (the legal truth) but are interested in politics - in other words, they are only interested in forcing companies to write open source drivers, by any means. Otherwise they would have to threaten and possibly sue the Debian project as well. You and many others have decided to support the kernel developers. Well, that's up to you but you should certainly accept - and this is what I am asking for - that other people might have other opinions about it. I am not taking anything for granted, I am asking for clarification - this might be considered as an unpopular position but I think sometimes it's necessary to swim against the current. As a software developer, I would certainly not call my code "derived from XYZ" just because of an XYZ header file that I include in my code. Maybe the kernel itself is somehow special and anything that includes kernel headers should be considered as "derived from". But this is exactly the question that needs to be answered. And neither of us is really able to do that. So we can continue this discussion forever, or we can just accept that there are different opinions and different points of view at the moment. I think at the end of the day we all want the same thing - good open-source drivers. It's just a question of how to get them, and here I consider my position as far more moderate than your position. We will see how this story continues. Greetings from London, Th. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
