GPL Issue

[John Cowan]

dtemeles at nvalaw.com scripsit:

> I'm not in any way suggesting that anyone can disregard public licenses 
> with impunity or otherwise.  A public license is a contract just like any 
> proprietary license.  Moglen and FSF seem to argue that public licenses 
> are a different animal altogether - a "bare license" - something that 
> exists outside of contract law.  

That analysis is confined, at least in practice, to the GNU GPL and LGPL.

> You mean like Katzer?  Sure, there probably aren't many bootleg sellers 
> of unmodified open source software, but there likely are numerous 
> applications that incorporate open source software in a manner that 
> violates the terms of the applicable license (i.e., derivative works of 
> open source apps). 

Indeed: hard to catch, though, as I said, particularly when it's compiled
code that's at stake.  Katzer was only caught because he was redistributing
human-readable files with the copyright notices hiked off.

-- 
No saves, Antonio, loke es morirse en su lingua. Es komo            John Cowan
kedarse soliko en el silensyo kada dya ke Dyo da, komo          cowan at ccil.org
ser sikileoso sin saver porke.                      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
                        --Marcel Cohen, 1985