GPL Lawsuit May Not Settle

A number of readers wrote in to inform us that contrary to earlier indications, it's no sure thing that the lawsuit alleging GPL violation by Monsoon Multimedia will get settled out of court. Linux.com now reports that the SFLC's legal director Daniel Ravicher has stressed that no agreement has been reached: "Simply coming into compliance now is not sufficient to settle the matter, because that would mean anyone can violate the license until caught, because the only punishment would be to come into compliance." (Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of Sourceforge, Inc.)

Comments

Kind of a stupid strategy...

[tjstork]

You really -don't- want to take a case to court, becuase, once in court, anything can happen. A judge can do whatever he or she wants, and those who want judges to really decide issues like this, would do well to imagine the consequences.

Let's assume that the GPL people win an initial round and the defendants takes it all the way up to the US Supreme Court on various appeals, countersuits, etc.

The question has to be asked : Does an admittedly left leaning GPL really want to ultimately be decided by the likes of Clarence Thomas? It seems to me that the GPL runs the risk of being arbitrarily declared so much commie crap by the SCOTUS, undermining the entire movement. A judge could make up anything, a Supreme Court, even more so, and they could declare the GPL to be in violation of anti-trust, unconstitutional because it is non-commercial, and any number of things. Once the Supreme Court rules, only Congress can effect the law at that point, by instructing the court, and the odds of anybody in the OSS movement having the clout to lobby congress, regardless of political party, seem to be about zero.

Re:Kind of a stupid strategy...

[tjstork]

You say "Does an admittedly left leaning GPL..." I want to know who "admit[ted]" that the GPL is "left leaning," and when. Don't cite me RMS's opinions on other matters, or the lifestyle of FLOSS users, or any other ad hominem red herrings. Tell me, specifically, whose admission you are referring to.

You know, that is some heap of non-logic you are throwing out there buddy. You would seriously believe that a person's body of thought is somehow isolated from a major portion of his work. That's absurd.

RMS's political philosophy is socialist, in that, he argues that the needs of the consumers so completely outweigh the rights of the producers that the producers of goods have no rights at all. The central thrust of his philosophy is that ownership is bad. That's socialism, and that, by definition, is leftist.

Being a software man, and, by all accounts, a rather intelligent and well thought one, he seeks to stamp his political philosophy into the technology world, before it is too late. To that end, RMS invents the GPL. The GPL is a license based on copyright. But note that he does not believe, per se, in copyright law. He argues, ultimtely, that http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/, that, software should not be "owned" at all, but recognizes that under most western law, that copyright is the means with which to best achieve his end, effectively.

Stallman notes the stock socialist criticism of the soviet union - the communists were bad, and they just wanted it all for themselves. The thing is, a more detailed look at the history of soviet communism would show that many of the communist leaders were really actually rather smart, and genuinely tried to do the right thing, but power corrupts, over time. To some degree, stalin's paranoid period aside, many of the communist constraints on freedom were really, like the GPL gone mad - to protect the workers, we have to have rule, after rule, after rule, to keep it just so. It just doesn't work, and a worse tyranny results. The downfall of any socialist system is that to get the social arrangement you want in even one aspect of it, sooner or later, you have to try to control all of it. It's just the nature of things.

Otherwise, I will file you (and any further arguments you may wish to make) next to people who misuse the word "literally," cannot distinguish between "to" and "too," and believe that quotation marks are used to add emphasis.

Your threat is silly. It's silly that you are offended that I've called the GPL for what it is, an attempt to put a socialist system into software. Note that, I didn't make any moral judgements about it. In all other fields, the "real fields", I think socialism is evil, not because the idea is bad, because, on paper, if it could work, it would have been alright. It's just, its failed everywhere it has been applied. But in software, who knows, maybe it might work. That software can be copied without cost changes things, and its worth it to let things play out, as the experiment of GPL, and following its consequences with non-free software, is really the social experiment of our time, and it should be viewed as a non-catastrophic and above all, peaceful way to study the interactions of radically different ideologies as they compete and coexist. Who knows, maybe from all of this, some new thoughts about a radically new economic system might arise from this interaction, that gives us the benefits of capitalism but that addresses the social concerns that socialism wants to, but can't.

If you claim to have an open mind, the first thing to do is call things what they are, not call them what you want people to believe them to be.

Re:Kind of a stupid strategy...

[tjstork]

It isn't that- people keep coming up with that because you don't precisely have to pay anything for it

No, my argument was more rhetorical. In America, the Supreme Court can do whatever it wants. Scalia rails on about Roe V Wade not being "constitutional" and then goes and does legal somersaults when it suits him. Justices don't have to make anything "logical". All they have to do is invent a set of tests for which their ruling applies, and then, say, in that case, here is the law. It can be as schizophrenic as they want.

So, if you put the GPL in front of the SCOTUS, you could get some arse of a Judge looking at it, decide that it wasn't inline with their philosophy, and then just invent some sort of ruling just to scupper the whole thing. The interesting thing is that RMS has actually thought of the ultimate experiment in the GPL: If one is against socialism, one is in favor of private ownership, but does a private owner have the right to compel his users to share to grant a license? Either way, RMS wins, as, some limit is placed on private ownership. I'm suprised more people on slashdot, so obsessed with the "cause", haven't really gleaned yet just how big this really is.

The GPL is THE socialogical question of our time. Even if I disagree with a lot of his ideas, the importance of what he has done cannot be underestimated. He's up there with Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Jefferson, etc, in terms of doing something new.

Is this really different from the RIAA or MPAA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, I'm rather disgusted by this whole ordeal. It strikes me as much akin to the RIAA and MPAA shenanigans.

This really makes using GPL'ed software a liability for any business. It just becomes too risky.

Now, maybe this isn't a bad thing. If GPL'ed softwrae becomes to dangerous to use, there's always an ample supply of BSD- and MIT-licensed software. FreeBSD, for instance, might start getting more of the commercial backing that Linux has gotten.

Re:Uh Oh... there in trouble

[RightSaidFred99]

I think they should take it to court. There's a good chance the results may not be pleasant to all the obsessive FOSS nutjobs. I _especially_ hope they try to take MS to court over the Novell thing sometime in the near future, that out to be hilariously amusing.

Re:Oh yeah

[talledega500]

GPL has nothing to do with copyright violation.
You either sue for GPL infringment (which no law supports)
or you sue for copyright infringement.

But you have no legal standing to enforce GPL no matter how many lawyers you throw at it.
Because noone gave the right to GPL licensers to restrict the usage of non-copyrighted material.

And copyrighted material is already covered clearly by existing law with no consideration for GPL.

Cant have it both ways Im afraid!

Good luck!

Re:hypocrite much?

[PietjeJantje]

It wasn't a troll, but rather modpoints were abused by people who simply did not like what you said. GPL fanboys are like Apple fanboys who troll down everyone in sight saying something vaguely critical about their beloved company. You can't just criticize these perfect people with truth, you troll! ;) They are not interested in a fair discussion, they want your opinion to disappear in oblivion. It happens all the time, and it is hurting the GPL as more and more people avoid the license of zealots.