bare license

[daniel wallace]

I wish to thank you for responding to my musings. I am a retired
physicist with little to do but ponder things in my spare time.

I observed that in the SCO v. IBM travesty that IBM legal in
their counterclaims against SCO described the GPL as:


"The Linux developers' public agreement to apply GPL terms
expresses in a binding legal form the conscious public covenant
that defines the open-source community -- a covenant that SCO
itself supported as a Linux company for many years."


Are the "public covenant" and "public agreement" phrases an attempt
to overcome privity questions? The "public covenant" brings to my
mind a "public trust" under common Trust Law where there are relaxed
privity contraints.

If privity concerns were overcome, wouldn't the "new right against
the world" principle still trigger preemption under sec. 301 because
the primary elements under consideration are exclusive copyrights? 






















"binding
legal form" this implied that the GPL was not a license
permission in their opinion.

I also observed that IBM called the GPL a "public agreement"   
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