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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."

3 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Right.... bit of clarification by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is an open source chess client called JIN licensed under the GPL.
    This is an executable and front end chess client.

    This has been extended by iChessU to support a closed source DLL which adds new functionality (notably video streaming between players).

    The source code to the Expanded client is available and providing you have the closed source binary DLL, you can run the newly compiled program.

    Isn't this like me releasing a GPL program which is linked to the nvidia or ATI blobs?

    Hell, isn't it similar if I write a GPL application which uses the Windows API?

    I personally feel as though this is an overreaction, the ichessu site does not hide the fact its based on JIN and offers sources, or am I wrong and this is infact a genuine GPL violation?

    --
    liqbase :: faster than paper
    1. Re:Right.... bit of clarification by jrumney · · Score: 5, Informative

      You're misunderstanding the terms of the GPL as they relate to various linking technologies. There are many armchair lawyers on slashdot who like to claim that the GPL only applies to static linking, or that using TCP sockets gets around it etc. But the GPL does not contain any mention of linking technologies or what is and isn't covered, it just talks about "derived works", which is up to the courts to define. In a case where the defendant approached the plaintif about licensing their work commercially then suddenly changed their mind and wrote some dynamic linking or socket based code specifically to "get around" the GPL, I would expect the court to side with the plaintif, since the defendant has shown that they understood from the start that what they wanted to do was not allowed under the GPL, and their intention is plainly to try to circumvent copyright law through technicalities, which the judge is unlikely to approve of.

  2. No it's not by brunes69 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Isn't this like me releasing a GPL program which is linked to the nvidia or ATI blobs?It isn't, because ATI and NVidia do not link to the kernel. The portions of the NVidia and ATi driver that *do* link directly to the kernel (also known as the "kernel stub"), are indeed GPL. What happns, is the closed source X driver communicates to and from the stub indirectly, not via linking.

    It's actually just a different DRM/DRI implementation, which nearly all X drivers use nowadays.

    Note in this case DRM does not mean "Digital Rights management", it means "Direct Rendering Manager"