GPL in Court - Good or Bad?

Posted by Cliff on Monday August 11, 2003 @11:55AM from the this-was-inevitable dept.

Irvu asks: "The Register has a lengthy opinion piece today about IBM's lawsuit, and the GPL. Barring a settlement this case will see the first test of the GPL in a court of law. Previously the GPL has functioned as a social contract with the implicit (albeit untested) force of law behind it. Any ruling now could radically alter the free-software/open-source landscape for good or ill. Andrew Orlowski dwells on these possible ills in his piece. What does Slashdot think? Is this test a good or bad thing? Do you have faith in the justice system (or IBM's Lawyers) to draw the right conclusions? And, how do you see any outcome affecting you?"

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Re:hapless troll -1 by Idealius · 2003-08-11 13:20 · Score: 0, Offtopic

Honestly, I'm a C/C++ programmer, and used Windows since the 2.0 days, I'm proficient in DOS, and I currently have a distro of Linux installed on my PC and would say I'm fairly proficient with it, too. The reason why I've never tried FreeBSD?

The name.

"BSD" sounds horrible, throw "Free" on it and I'm just confused. Anyway, that's just IMO.