Automatic GPL termination
dlw
danw6144 at insightbb.com
Tue Sep 18 14:35:40 UTC 2007
"I firmly disagree with that position, but nonetheless we will do
something to meet these needs. I ultimately regard these believes as
narrow-minded and foolish, it belongs to half a dozen law professors
around the world, each of whom should check his cards again, and it's
all "he". They are people with gray hair and old minds. They're not very
old minds, because if in each of their legal systems they went to their
old legal dictionaries and looked at what the word licence means, or if
they got real Roman about it and went and looked in the Institutes of
Justinian to find out what licence means, they would discover that a
licence is a unilateral permission, not an obligation, and so what
happens is that these minds that say these thing, they're stuck in a
little space, a thousand years after Justinian and before the Second
World War." -- Eben Moglen
http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/barcelona-moglen-transcript.en.html
Eben Moglen's Phd is in History. In the above quote he is saying
disregard all contemporary laws, statutes and present day court
precedents. Go back and let the legal principles of the Byzantine Empire
of 500 AD guide your crafting of copyright license. How can present day
Free Software believers wallow in the tripe that Moglen spews? His goal
is the destruction of
"intellectual property" in commerce.
All free software licenses that contain schemes to control evolving
(downstream) derivative works -- "to keep the code open" -- are
preempted under US copyright law. Why don't those that believe in open
source just use Academic Free or BSD style licenses and forget the silly
socialist schemes? If coders don't want the proprietary world to "steal
their code" then publish it with a scope restriction "no commercial use"
-- that restriction is easily enforceable under copyright law.
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