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Mambo Users Are Free And Clear
ValourX writes "By now most of you have heard of the copyright infringement and code theft claims involving the Mambo content management system and businessman Brian Connolly. Legal questions have been raised, guesses have been made, commentary has flowed forth, and everyone involved in the dispute has had their fifteen minutes to relay their sad tale of injustice. Now it is time for the facts, and NewsForge can definitively say, based on material and quotes from Larry Rosen, Dan Ravicher, and Eben Moglen, that Connolly's legal threats against innocent Mambo users are baseless. Part of the new information in this article reveals that the SCO Group helped Brian Connolly by giving him some media contacts. NewsForge is part of OSTG, like Slashdot."
I'm so glad that this critical speculation has made the front page of Slashdot.
So where are the facts?
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
This is just a lame attempt to keep playing the "open source is dangerous" riff that Microsoft loves so well. The main offensive (and I mean that in all senses of the word) is, of course, the SCO case. Fortunately, this course of attack will eventually fall on deaf ears if no valid case is actually put together. Expect more of this kind of thing until the mainstream press realizes there is no story here and decides to move along.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Newsforge can definitively say whatever it wants and be correct about it without being a lawyer. It can say that your claim is completely worthless and can be 100% correct. I can say if you jump off a 3 story building you are going to get hurt. I can say it definitively and it's not legal advice.
I didn't realize we just extended this charge to hacking, so I guess someone will be arrested soon, but if you hack into a site to download it, you are still probably giving yourself either root or ftp access to download it, therefore that statement is still correct. Reverse engineering to my knowledge is not illegal unless you have a license agreement specifically covering that. I don't have enough information to really go into that.
This reply means absolutely nothing. It's not even on topic of what it's rebutting. The contract quoted is irrelevant because he is not contributing the copyrighted code. He is contributing different code. The fact that the person bringing these charges never even looked at the other code is unbelievable. From the Newsforge article "Connolly admits that he has not compared the code for himself, or even looked at the Mambo code to verify that it contains code developed specifically for Furthermore." Ok he's saying you stole my stuff, but I haven't looked at my stuff or your stuff, I just believe you did and therefore it's true. Go work for CBS. Regarding the rest of it, it seems that he is confusing copyright with patents. You can copyright specific code, but not the function of that code. There may be 10 ways to draw a circle on a screen. You copyright your code to do that. Maybe you use arc functions. Someone else does the same thing pixel by pixel. Someone else calls a draw line function with a length of 1 pixel. All of them may produce identical results however the copyright holder can not sue the second two parties and claim infringement because the resulting output is the same. This is where software patents come into play, and he does not to my knowledge have a patent on the format. It would be shot down by prior art if he did. So what he is almost admitting to is sure, the code is different, but the result is the same, and therefore it's infringement. Not under copyright law it's not.
No, it wouldn't (IANAL).
"SCO and IBM are the big guys", Connelly was quoted as saying in the article. I find this funny, even before SCO went down its path to self destruction in the last year it employed less people and probably had less turnover than the average suburban shopping mall. IBM is a few orders of magnitude beyond that.
This statement is not entirely correct. If I create a derivative work based on GPLed code and don't redistribute it, no one has the right to steal it from me and put my changes back into the original open source version. This guy who did the contract work (assuming there was a typical contract) signed over his ownership to the derivative work to Connelly. By keeping a local copy (which he should not have) and putting derivatives of that back into the main project, he may have effectively stole the code from his employer and put it under GPL.
IANAL, but people need to follow owership and distribution very closely. If there was no contract my limited understanding of these issues breaks down in a hurry - I would assume without proper assignment he can do whatever because it's actually his code but again IANAL.
It bothers me to see GPL proponents getting too carried away and assuming that the public has a right to use anything that came from GPLed work. I doubt the guy is right, but it would NOT be because of the GPL. It looks to me like it comes down to pure ownership in this case because Connelly never distributed any code.
IANAL, so please correct me if I'm wrong here.
Also keep in mind that we're apparently talking about less than a half dozen lines of code, doing something rather obvious that can't really be done too many different ways. It's my understanding that this is probably not copyrightable to begin with.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
If Sakic was contracted to modify GPL'd code under these conditions, that term of the contract must be void, as LiteratiGroup do not have the rights to enforce that term.
Not at all. The GPL doesn't in any way effect who has copyright to the code.
The GPL relies upon copyright; without (c), the GPL would be meaningless. Adding (c) code to GPL'd (c) code is only possible by accepting the terms of the GPL.
True. True. False. Accepting the source or the binary if you are NOT the copyright holder requires accepting the terms of the GPL (unless the code is available under another license from the copyright holder). However, the copyright holder is not bound to accept the GPL unless they distribute their copyrighted work as a derivative work of other code that the copyright holder was licensed under the terms of the GPL.
sigs are a waste of space