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GPL Gets Its Day in Court in Israel

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the never-fun-to-break-new-legal-ground dept.

MadFarmAnimalz writes "In what appears to be the first court test for the GPL in the Middle East, Alexander Maryanovsky, the author of the GPL licensed Jin Chess Client is taking IchessU to court for violations of the GPL license."

4 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Right.... bit of clarification by TERdON · · Score: 4, Insightful

    GNU about the GPL: "This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General Public License instead of this License."

    And in the license itself: "For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable."

    IMHO, that means Windows API = ok, Java API = ok, .NET API = ok, own API or library = not okay.

    And that makes sense. Otherwise I could just build all of my app in my "MainApp API" and GPL my "StartMainApp()" function call... :)

    --
    I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
  2. Re:Right.... bit of clarification by bloodredsun · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Nope.

    Only part of the client source code is downloadable, not the whole; this is a violation of the GPL. Also, the iChessU has an EULA which violates the GPL by placing new restrictions on how the code may be used.

    The bad faith negotations accusation may be an overreaction but it's hard not to think this when iChessU initially wanted to license JIN but backed out when it appeared too expensive for them and then proceeded to use it anyway.

    This is not an overreaction but a devloper fighting to prevent a third party assuming legal control of that developers work.

  3. Re:In a way, this is very lucky timing for GPLv3 by Watson+Ladd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why are laws written in english anyway? English is ambiguous, and that's a bad thing. Why not some formal law language with clear semantics and syntax?

    --
    Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
  4. Re:GPL doesn't need to be tested. by FooBarWidget · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Actually it does. Or can you merge GPL code and non-GPL code in a single codebase? This is a restriction of how you can use the code you obtained through the GPL license.

    That is not a restriction that GPL adds: you never were allowed to do that in the first place. Suppose the code is not under any license, then standard copyright law applies. And copyright law does not let you copy that code to your code AT ALL.