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MySQL AB and Nusphere Go to Court Over GPL
A little fairy whispered in our ear: "MySQL AB is seeking a temporary injunction against NuSphere, even though they've finally released the source code for Gemini and MySQL Advantage. According to the GPL, NuSphere lost the right to redistribute when they violated #3 by not providing the source code originally. The FSF will testify tomorrow in court, according to this Newsforge article." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN. We've done a couple of previous stories about the MySQL AB vs. Nusphere conflict: the original story, a follow-up, and a note about a countersuit.
Update: 02/26 21:15 GMT by T :
bkuhn (Bradley Kuhn of the Free Software Foundation) writes: "The FSF has a press release on the matter and affidavit that we filed is also available."
FSF's policy with respect to GPL violations is to secure compliance, not damages. When a party has violated GPL, and the violation is called to our attention (which happens on the average some dozens of times each year), we inform the party in violation of its responsibilities, and advise it on the steps necessary to come into compliance. It is our practice that once a party has taken steps to comply, and has entered into confidence-building measures to ensure that future non-compliance will be avoided wherever possible, and rapidly discovered and remedied where inadvertently reproduced, distribution rights under GPL 4 are restored on a cooperative non-judicial basis. In this fashion, I have secured compliance with the license in dozens of cases over the past decade, and have never had to resort to judicial measures of mandatory enforcement. Without the leverage provided by 4, however, parties would resort to repetitive partial compliance, ``capable of repetition but evading review,'' in language the Supreme Court has applied to a different sort of situation, substantially if not overwhelmingly complicating the task of securing reliable compliance with the license
You call this more "free" than the copyright?
I sure as hell don't. It's just as bad as the RIAA going after copyright holders for sharing music.
If the GPL license was truly "Free", there would never be a court case, because you could do whatever you wanted with the source code. Unfortunatly, because of the vast restrictions instilled by our favorite chap richard Stallman, people are forced to give our their source code for free. (provided they have made an alteration to a Gnu'd work).
I am going to use the same argument that many have used in legitimizing music:
If someone is making money off of your sourcecode, why does it matter? It's not like your are losing money each time your code is used.
The only true "free" license is public domain.