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."
The "better argument" claim was made in regards to the GPL enforcement issue, not the trademark issue. The judge was indicating that MySQL's claim that NuSphere violated the GPL is more believable than NuSphere's claim that they didn't.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The wording is definitely ambiguous. In fact, the GPL FAQ even has this question that addresses what constitutes aggregation between a GPL'd program and a non-GPL'd program.
Essentially, noone is really sure how far the GPL extends. I think linking is pretty straight forward but there are other things that are a little sketchy. I think we are due for a GPL v3.0.
If users lose rights from the GPL being thrown out, then that could potentially be very bad. I know in a lot of corporate environments, if the GPL was thrown away and an author couldn't be contacted, a lot of work could potentially become invalid due to licensing problems.
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