Proprietary software for Linux

[InfoNuovo at cs.com]

It may be useful to point out what may be a common fallacy.

As far as I know, as a private individual or organization in the U.S., you
don't get to sue someone for infringing the copyright of another.  (I don't
know how to say it better than that, and I'm not going to consult an
attorney about it.)

That is, as much as a member of the open-source community might feel
involved and injured by an alleged breach of the GPL by someone, it strikes
me that it would be surprising to be given any standing by a court.  To
pursue a breach of copyright, I'd think you'd pretty much have to be the
copyright holder to even be heard.  (Other *non-exclusive* licensees might
make it difficult on the copyright holder for tolerating an apparent breach,
including defecting from the community around the software at issue, but I
think there would be little recourse beyond influencing the copyright
holder.)

That's independent of whether it is credible that the GPL can successfully
prevent users installing and operating proprietary software on Linux
systems.

-- Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: anicolao at iname.net [mailto:anicolao at iname.net]On Behalf Of Alex
Nicolaou
Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 1999 23:48
To: Angelo.Schneider at xcc.de
Cc: Alex Nicolaou; license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: Re: Can Java code EVER be GPLd, at all?


Angelo Schneider wrote:

[ ... ]

... It would be an irony beyond measure to have Microsoft sue
Corel and others for providing proprietary software for Linux ...

[ ... ]

alex