SFLC will love the 7th Circuit

[Alexander Terekhov]

Hi Philippe,

the legal sceme is really simple:

1. Party A "Google France Enterprise LLC" (majority owned subsidiary
of "Google $600 Gorilla") sells the boxes (rebranded DELL or IBM or HP
or SUN or some chipo NONAME blades certified as "Designed for
Tivoization") to "Google Secret Summer of Code LLC" (also majority
owned subsidiary of "Google $600 Gorilla") Party B.

2. Party B installs the code and resells it back to Party A. Party B
carefully fulfills all the GPL obligations to its client Party A.

3. Party A now resells the boxes to You (Party C consumer) under
draconian contract. You are required to assign all your rights to
software updates to Party A. This transaction doesn't fall under the
GPL since it is permitted by Doctrine of First Sale.

Party A is off the hook. Because of First Sale, Party B does not need
the copyright owner's permission to distribute its copies, and so the
act of distributing does not constitute acceptance of the offered
license. You enjoy your boxes. Welcome to the wonderful word of First
Sale.

On 10/15/07, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> Chris DiBona [mailto:cdibona at gmail.com] wrote:
> > Actually, you're mixing up earth (where the issue is that Richard
> > wants the imagery that we ourselves do not own) and the google search
> > appliance. I invite you to go mess with the mirror on code.google.com,
> > and not confuse the gplv3 and gplv2 wrt replacability.
>
> There was no confusion. What I said was a question (a set of questions in
> fact) about this fully proprietary Google box that Google does not want
> their customers to look into (that's why it does not want to give the source
> and not even any installable binary, or any details about how it is built,
> and what it contains; Google says that it contains only material built by
> Google, and that he owns all the rights on it). It remains a good question:
> which exclusive right is effectively transferred by the sale contract? If
> there's no such right, the sale is invalid. If it's a service contract, it
> must include an assistance as long as the service is provided...
>
> Now I was not speaking about the code.google.com community network that is
> used as a base for open-sourced and free projects. But effectively about the
> full proprietary GSA and Mini appliances sold by Google Enterprise (which
> implement documented API to the outside, but Google gives no detail about
> their internals, and no right to look for that information).
> i.e. http://www.google.fr/intl/us/enterprise/intranet_search.html
> (and look at the very expensive price for a simple PC in a rack, and that
> Google describes as "affordable", "cost effective"). If the data you want to
> index merits this price, then it is very precious, and these are good
> reasons for requesting details about how the data is used and protected.
> This is even more critical for the "Universal" versions of these appliances.
>
> These products also have no trial versions (you must contact Google to
> negociate it and sign a contract); you only have a limited 30-day refund
> policy after the sale for the Mini.
>
> Google says that it is not available as a software only product (because it
> would reduce the TCO, however the price of the integrated hardware is
> certainly ridiculous compared to the rest; the software part is sold with
> extremely large commercial margins (that go much above the cost of the
> included 2 years assistance, 1 year for the Mini)... The assistance is ONLY
> by email (no guaranteed delays and no security in emails, each additional
> year costs nearly two thirds of the initial price, no phone contact for the
> mini, supplement to pay to have phone support on GSA).
>
> Google says that the box runs a modified version of Linux (GPL-licenced),
> that it renamed "Google Linux":
> http://www.google.com/support/gsa/bin/answer.py?answer=15898&topic=-1
>
> And if you think that the GSA code is open-source (may be it was true) this
> is no longer the case (even the distribution mirror for just patches has
> been deleted, and there's nothing available on code.google.com for GSA). And
> don't expect you'll be able to locate it elsewhere on the net using the
> Google search website!

regards,
alexander.

--
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