GPL Gets Its Day in Court in Israel

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."

Comments

Re:Right.... bit of clarification

[oliverthered]

If they ship the dll with the application then it may be a GPL violation if it falls out of the mere aggregation clause. When you write a GPL application against the windows API you don't usually ship the application with the windows API, and there has been a case of someone shipping a distro with the binary ATI + NVidia drivers being pulled up by the FSF for violation of the GPL.

Personally I don't see how the GPL can be violated here and yet we still have PC's shipping with GPL software on them.

Re:Right.... bit of clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article, it says that they are accessing GPL code through sockets and open sourced the wrapper they wrote in order to do this. The proprietary DLL obviously works on top of JIN and interacts with it over sockets. The JIN author incorrectly believes that this violates the GPL. In fact, since the server code is never distributed, it can be modified in house without violating the license. If developed correctly, iChessU could easily leverage JIN, stay closed-source, and be fully complient.

In a way, this is very lucky timing for GPLv3

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

It's great that we will get the benefit of this ruling during the year when GPLv3 is being written. This sort of thing provides great suggestions for what should be clearer or worded differently.

Re:In a way, this is very lucky timing for GPLv3

[kripkenstein]

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?

There are very good reasons why this is impossible. Actually, what you are proposing is a very natural notion, that sadly turns out to be wrong. I say 'natural', because during the first third or so of the 20th century, philosophy (of language, in particular), was seeking exactly what you are driving at - a 'pure' language, free from ambiguity. This would have had benefits for legal matters, as well as philosophical ones, and even metamathematical implications. But this was shown to be a futile attempt (Wittgenstein being the major figure showing this). I'll briefly summarize why this is so.

First, when you refer to human-related things - as laws are, they mention e.g. 'assault', 'homicide', and so forth - there is no way to 'clean up' the language. It cannot be made unambiguous, because the underlying concepts are ambiguous. Try to define (as the famous example goes) 'game'. For any suggested definition, there are counterexamples (e.g. not all games are about winning or losing, not all games have scores, not all games are fun, etc. etc.). This is a simple consequence of the fact that life is complex - we use the word 'game' in many contexts, in many ways. Unlike in math, where we start with definitions, in the law we start with pre-existing human concepts and try to work with them. We therefore cannot arrive at unambiguous statements.

Second, and this is a more subtle issue, language is meaningless without a context of use. By this I mean, that if you see some scribbles on a page, they are worthless without someone to read them. A sentence + a reader are what is necessary for 'meaning' to exist. Thus, even if we write what we believe to be unambiguous text, we can never remove the element of the reader: for us, the statement is unambiguous, but for another person, with a slightly different mindset, it may not be so. You may claim that your interpretation is 'correct', but that will not avail you when a matter is put before the public, i.e. open to interpretation by many people, as the law must be.

Sorry to go on at length, but this is a fascinating topic for me.

Re:Right.... bit of clarification

[TheRaven64]

The question is slightly different when it comes to plug-ins, however.

What happens if you release a GPL'd program with a plug-in API? That's fine.

Now you release a closed-source plug-in. That's not fine, since the plug-in is a derived work of the GPL'd plug-in system; it won't work without it.

Now, what happens if you license the plug-in API as a separate module under the LGPL (for example). The closed-source plug-in only depends on the plug-in module, which is LGPL'd. It inherits the GPL when used with a GPL'd application, but you could argue that the plug-in does not require a GPL'd program.

Now, when you use the plug-in, you link it with a GPL'd application. This would be a GPL violation, except for the fact that the GPL only comes into effect when distributing (it is not a EULA).

Doesn't matter

[brunes69]

Pipes, temp files, sockets, none of these are covered by the GPL. The GPL covers explicitly *linking only*. If a GPL'ed piece of software could not communicate with a closed source piece of software over a socket or pipe, the Apache web server would not exist.

To be specific - I am pretty sure the drivers use either a UNIX socket or a named pipe.

Re:Doesn't matter

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

According to my reading of the GPL FAQ entry on mere aggregation, if the two pieces communicate data which is internal and specific to the GPLd piece, the other piece is also covered by the GPL.

Perhaps that was just an unfortunate choice of words, or a small language barrier if you're not a native English speaker. However, unless your law works very differently to most, you can't force anyone else to licence their code in any specific way, including under the GPL. To say "the other piece is also covered by the GPL" would therefore be wrong.

Of course, it may be a copyright infringement for them to use your (GPL'd) code in their product if their code is not released with a compatible licence, but that has very different implications. If they're infringing your copyright, a court might be able to issue an injunction banning the use of your code and/or award you compensation, for example. However, the code behind "the other piece" hasn't magically become licensed under the GPL, and no-one has any magical rights to see/reuse the source code.

(IANAL, don't get legal advice from Slashdot, etc. etc.)

Not pipes or sockets ... merely source

[Gopal.V]

I've been watching the kororaa project for a while, ever since we did one tandem session with XGL and OS X on two machines, watching XGL rule - especially in the video across cube faces demo. But a few weeks later, the developer announced that he's stopping Kororaa because of GPL issues with properietary drivers. And here's a reply by the FSF.

Now, the point to note here is that GPL is redistribution license. The way the nVidia folks handle it is to give the user some code, a binary blob and effectively tell them to build it themselves. The code they distribute does not link to the Linux kernel *yet*, while the binary blob is the closed source bit. Now, what the user does is to link them all up and there you go - which is not the distributor's fault. And this works because they are not redistributing any code that is copyrighted by a Linux kernel author (for example laf0rge).

The whole model makes the user violate GPL in principle, while the distributor (i.e nVidia) is in the gray area of legality. This is of course, my understanding from following up all this (and then had an argument with a paralegal @ work about GPL).

But I could be wrong you know ...

Re:Not pipes or sockets ... merely source

[Hellkitten]

The whole model makes the user violate GPL in principle

Actually, since the end user doesn't distribute anything there is no violation there. So the end user is still in the white. Depending on the interpretation of the GPL Nvidia may be in a gray/black area.