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GPL Hard to Enforce?

Posted by samzenpus on from the who-owns-it dept.

the-dark-kangaroo writes "The GPL may be difficult to enforce due to a lack of clarity over who owns the copyright to the software, according to a legal expert. Lucie Guibault, an assistant professor of intellectual-property law at the Institute for Information Law in Amsterdam, said at the Holland Open Software Conference in Amsterdam, that the GPL should clarify who is the author of the software to ensure that open source software distributed under this licence receives legal protection."

1 of 361 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Stupid stupid article by El+Cubano · · Score: 4, Informative

    Seriously, you can't pay someone to come up with schlock this bad.

    No kidding. Check this out (from vmscan.c in the Linux kernel):

    /*
    * linux/mm/vmscan.c
    *
    * Copyright (C) 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 Linus Torvalds
    *
    * Swap reorganised 29.12.95, Stephen Tweedie.
    * kswapd added: 7.1.96 sct
    * Removed kswapd_ctl limits, and swap out as many pages as needed
    * to bring the system back to freepages.high: 2.4.97, Rik van Riel.
    * Zone aware kswapd started 02/00, Kanoj Sarcar (kanoj@sgi.com).
    * Multiqueue VM started 5.8.00, Rik van Riel.
    */

    Any doubts about whose the copyright is?