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German Court Says GPL is Valid
Axel Metzger writes "The Munich District Court has ruled on May 19, 2004 that the main clauses of the GNU General Public License are valid under German copyright and contract law. This seems to be the first judgment worldwide proofing the validity of the most popular free software license. The ruling is a confirmation of the preliminary injunction of April 2, 2004. The new judgment gives on 20 pages the reasons for the ruling. It states explicitly that the terms of section 2, 3 and 4 of the GPL are valid under German copyright and contract law. Here is the German text of the judgment; an English translation will be available soon. The judgment comes at the right time to fight those (SCO and others) who challenge the legal validity of the GPL in Europe and elsewhere. The lawyer of the plaintiffs, Till Jaeger from Munich should be granted the Free Software Award."
Please note that the German copyright law (Urheberrecht, as it is called) is quite different from the US copyright.
Rough translation pasted from my Groklaw posting,
/ralph -- that is all of the heise article!
sorry for the messed up formating:
The open source project netfilter/iptables has won a huge success in the legal
battle against the router manufacturer Sitecom: With the decision of May 19,
2004 (Az. 21 O 6123/03) the Landgericht München [something like a district
court? R.] has confirmed the temporary injuction. Acording to this the
manufacturer Sitecom is prohibited to sell its WLAN routers until further
notice. Also the comparatively high amount of the dispute of Euro 100000 was
confirmed in the decision.
In the written opinion which was published on friday, it is clearly stated that
the judge considers the GPL valid for principal reasons. It says: "The
chamber shares the opionion that the conditions of the GPL can under no
circumstances be seen as an abandonment of copyrights and legal positions linked
to copyright." The sueing developer was legitimized to demand the rights
linked to the sourcecode
This makes it finally clear that the GPL model also works according to
German law", rejoiced Lawyer Till Jaeger, who represents the
netfilter/iptables project, in an interview with heise online. After this
"probably worldwide first decision on the validity and enforcability"
it was assured that the open source community defends itself. On the other hand
the Court has made it clear, that nobody has anything to fear if he plays by the
rules of the GPL
It is unknown if the router manufacturer plans furter legal steps. Jaeger's
client in the mean time found out that Sitecom offers one additional router
model (WL-111) with a firmware that infringes the GPL. A fine of 10000 Euro
because of infringement against the temporary injunction has already been
demanded, declared Jaeger
Truly a reason to rejoice, for Jaeger and for us!
Microsoft speaks against the GPL for this very reason - now the developers must reveal their source code, because it was based on GPL'ed code. But what they conveniently neglect to mention is that according to the EULA, a Windows developer cannot distribute, or even build, a derivative of Windows, under any terms . The license for GPL code covers only distribution of derivative products, whereas the MS EULA covers merely using the product. In fact, to even view the source code for an MS product requires that a developer agree to never develop a competing product!
Merely posting the source will allow these guys to continue to ship their product, but if they'd chosen the Microsoft development model, they'd owe royalties for every single product shipped!
Even though these guys might not like divulging their source code, they are still in a much better position than had they used Microsoft's code as a basis for their product.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Yes, you are entitled to the source code, and it is available from their site.
You can also redistribute it. Make sure you remove all the copyrighted material such as the SuSE logos and the installation program and help files, however. And make sure you remove any and all non-GPL stuff that you don't have a right to redistribute, such as Acrobat or any other such included programs. And you better recompile everything from scratch so you are sure their is nothing in the binaries that you don't have rights to redistribute. There are probably a lot of other rules, too.
Completely wrong. I suggest you read the GPL. There's no clause even suggesting that you can't distribute non-GPL code on the same CD. In fact, a large amount of code that comes with nearly every single Linux distribution is non-GPL. Apache httpd, PHP, X11, Perl, Python, etc. Most of those are GPL-compatible, but they certainly aren't GPL. The only time that the GPL affects other code is if it's linked to the GPL code, such as a static library or module.
Karma: Contrapositive