Judicial Order in MySQL AB vs. Nusphere Suit

bkuhn writes: "Judge Saris has ruled on the preliminary injunction motion. The Court recognizes in today's order that MySQL AB "seems to have the better argument" on the GNU GPL matter. The Court fully recognized the need for expert testimony at trial about the GNU GPL and the technical facts at hand, particularly as to why static linking of software components into a single, unified, compiled binary forms a derivative work of the original components."

Comments

Re:Set that precident

[evilviper]

I suspect that you do not know what the expression fair use means.

Guess again.

For you to create a derivative work from the GPL (which is a copyrighted work of the FSF) and publish it as a license to your software would not fall into any of those categories.

In papers I have written, I have quoted documents in whole, nearly as legenthy as the GPL itself. Besides, you are reading only want you want to from 'fair use'.

Fair use is far more complex than you take into account. By using it I am not devaluing the copyrighted work, my use would be non-commercial, etc. There are many ways such use would qualify.

You and I both quote each other's writings, even though neither has been granted permission. Why is that legal? It's legal because we don't take credit for the works of each other, we aren't using it commercially, or decreasing the market value of each others work. Considering that the GPL is even more freely available that our comments on slashdot, I don't see how you can claim that I can't claim the same right to use it.

If you believe that the invalidation of the GPL would allow you to relicense GPLed works under your choice of license, you are deluding yourself. In the absence of the GPL, those works revert to normal copyright protection

No, the court doesn't just say "sorry, the GPL is declared invalid". They will say something such as: "the GPL clause of requiring derivitive works is not legal". Which would make GPLed software approximately on the same ground as the BSD license. I wouldn't need to change the license, but I could very well use it with fewer restrictions (provided the court decides as I hope it will).