Ask FSF General Counsel Eben Moglen

Columbia Law School professor Eben Moglen has been the Free Software Foundation's (pro bono) general counsel since 1993. He's also involved with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and has been mentioned on Slashdot a number of times because of his participation in these groups and some of the worthy causes they support, as well as other freedom-related matters. One question per post, please. We'll run Prof. Moglen's answers to 10 of the highest-moderated questions as soon as he gets them back to us.

Comments

Re:Clarifying the GPL

[Arandir]

You might be better off coming to an arangement with the authors of the JAR software

Short response: If you need to come to an arangement with the author, then his software isn't Free. Duh!

Long response: Avoid GPLd libraries like the plague. If the library isn't under the LGPL/BSD/MIT/MPL/Proprietary, then you must assume that the author does not want you to *USE* the library. If you were sued, you would of course win in court, because the terms of the GPL are quite clear. But you don't want to be sued to begin with. So avoid the software. Most people who use the GPL don't understand what it means. They assume that derivation means whatever they want it to mean, and not what copyright law specifically defines it to be. The risk of the author being one of these types is too great to risk your financial well being over.

Re:What can be done about spurious legal threats?

[ajakk]

Because we know that the Free Software community would never do such a thing as well. The reason that the GPL has never been challenged in court is because of the community pressure against companies and individuals who are thought to be violating it. These companies are doing the same thing that the Free software community does. As to what you can do, donating to organizations who fight spurious lawsuits is probably a good start. Second, even if you don't want to go to law school, I would recommend doing what you can to actually learn the law. I have seen far too many discussions on Slashdot among people who have no concept about what the actual law is.