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GPL vs. Skype Back In Court
mollyhackit writes "Hackaday reports that the GPL vs Skype case is going back to court today. This as an appeal to the court's decision Slashdot reported last July. The original case was brought against Skype for the Linux based SMC Skype WiFi phone. The court upheld the GPLv2 and decided that Skype had not gone far enough in meeting section 3 which details how to provide the original source. This time around Skype is apparently trying to argue that the GPL violates anti-trust regulations."
Or you could use that free thing, add value to it and post the source code like you are supposed to. Then you save money and help out the public good all at the same time. That is how GPL is supposed to work.
I think, Bruce, that the difference in this case is that it's being tried in Germany, not the US. I suspect that Germany puts as much value on US precedence as the US puts in Germany's.
Still, it does appear to be a stretch.
Caveat: IANAL.
But my exes dad was, he was the head of the anti truct division of the justice department in Los Angeles for 15 years.
He had two seminal cases: 1) He beat Howard Hughes in court and 2) he was the guy behind US. Vs. Brown Shoe which I understand was a landmark case and is required reqading for anti trust lawyers today. Never mind Reagan gutted most anti-trust law.
To run afoul of the Sherman anti trust act you must control 2% of the total means of production of something. This is clearly not the case.
This is off the top of my head. Queue NewYorkCountryLawyer dude to correct me (as usual).
Need Mercedes parts ?
This case is being tried in Germany, so a different set of anti-trust laws apply than in the IBM case. The original case was brought by people involved in the gpl-violations.org project, who have a good track record of ensuring companies follow the principle of the GPL for products released in Germany. (IIRC, IANAL in Germany anyone can bring a copyright case to court, it doesn't have to be the actual owner of the copyright)
GPL vs Skype is being held in Munich, not in the US. And the GPL has been successfully tested at least once in Germany.
Your head a splode
Igb, I'm assuming that you're talking about the sources with this. As long as they're the sole copyright holder, they don't have to release the source for those changes, as they aren't a licensee of their own software. If I as the author of some GPL'ed software choose to release a binary-only version of that software under some other license with a feature not encompassed in the GPL release, I'm free to do so. I certainly won't get much standing in the community for it, but I am free to do it. MySQL had plans to do this before Sun reversed that path.
Only the copyright-owner is allowed to file a case. However, Harald Welte (author of things like IPTABLES) is german and head of gpl-violations.org.
You don't know the alternative and call yourself a geek? Or, maybe an AC is no a geek!
The alternative is to use SIP phones. And then if you don't like one provider, you get another. For example,
http://les.net/
is one provider I've had experience with. But you can get lots more if you want,
http://www.sipcenter.com/sip.nsf/html/Service+Providers
With SIP you can use ANY provider and not waste money on substandard service. Heck, with SIP *you* can be your own provider with Asterisk PBX software.
There is probably more real phones available for SIP than the proprietary protocols like Skype,
http://www.grandstream.com/products.html
Very good phones from my own experience. Skype has been an obsolete VoIP solution for years now. Anyone seriously looking for a flexible VoIP solution, will only look at SIP.
9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.
You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.
In the GPLv2, the language was simpler: "You are not required to accept this license, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission..." It's completely clear. You accept the terms of the GPL as written, or you don't use the code. Period.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
This is a common myth and it's false. If the GPL was invalidated all the code would be owned by it's authors and thier would be no legal way for anyone to use the code without the authors permission. The only time something becomes public domain is after a very long time or if the Author intentionally and legally releases it.
according to this site (in German) the appeal has been withdrawn and skype has retreated with its tail between its legs.
...
until they take a few minutes to understand
it.
http://www.linux-magazin.de/news/
It seems - as usual - lawyers think they can beat down the "amateur made" gpl
That's not how it works.
Both Germany and the U.S. have ratified the Bern Copyright Convention (of sometime in the seventies), which made the default all rights reserved if there is no license, not public domain.
If a GPL term were found to be unlawful, it would be severed from the rest of the license, and the rest of the license would stand.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Actually SCO was not only laughed out of german court, they were asked to shut up or be fined for libel, because their statements was so absurd the court could only find them deliberately malicious.
The only precedence that matters in Germany is if the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany declares something unconstitutional, but this won't matter in the GPL vs. Skype case. Besides this every court decision isn't and shouldn't be affected by other courts' decisions directly. This is law and this is how it is in Germany.
Linking, even dynamic linking, doesn't get you off the hook if you distribute all of the pieces together and they don't work separately. It doesn't necessarily get you off the hook in other cases either (avoiding a long legal discussion).
However, the Skype code, at least the important part of it, isn't in the Linux kernel. It's a user-mode application and the GPL of the kernel doesn't apply to it.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
The GPL is *NOT* an EULA! It's a DISTRIBUTION license!!!
"The terms of the GPL prohibit charging for GPL code ever"
This is a horrible misconception.
You can charge whatever people will pay for GPL code.
You just can't sell it to them without also granting them the code and the right to redistribute. That's it. Nothing says no money may change hands.
This is the difference between "free as in freedom" and "free as in beer". GPL code is free as in freedom, not beer.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
I wonder what they're going to do about Wallace v. FSF which already decided that the GPL does not violate any anti-trust laws?
IANAL, but it would seem that a court having already decided this exact issue would pretty much kill their case. Wallace lost on summary judgment, which means that the court in that case found that, even if everything he said was true (and that was doubtful), he could not prevail.
In other words, that claim is very likely to go nowhere, fast. The judge in the Wallace case was a well-respected anti-trust expert, too.