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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."
Perhaps if they code something off their own back then rather than leech off the work of others, there would be no problem. Honestly, the nerve!
...and the license won!
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
If you don't like GPL terms, don't use GPL software. How much simpler can it be?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
IANAL, but it seems like their's only two coices 1) The GPL is valid and they need to comply 2) The GPL is invalid and they arein violation of copyright. Aren't they shooting themselves in the foot arguing that it's invalid?
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Maybe it's time I shitcanned my Skype account.
Antitrust regulations govern interactions and arrangements among companies. The GPL can be one of those. Cross-licensing agreements, effectively what the GPL is, have been held to violate antitrust law when they're used to keep competitors out of a market.
Consider a company that manages to create a de facto standard based on GPL software and then use the GPL to force competitors to release changes to their own software. The original company doesn't have to do this (since, as the author, it doesn't have to release its own changes). As a result, the original company has a competitive advantage over its competitors.
I'm not asserting that this applies here. But, there are situations where it might.
Well, if they tried to do it in a smart way. This is about the most stooooopid way possible. First, they use a legal theory that only a fool would pursue and that is, indeed, known for having been pursued foolishly only to be dismissed with a very clear finding by the judge in a U.S. court. Then, they pursue this case when complying with the terms of the GPL would cost them nothing, which is the mark of a lawyer who isn't considering his client's best interest. There is nothing special about Skype that belongs in the Linux kernel. Their proprietary software is safe in user-mode, where this case won't touch it. The only things that would need releasing is the customization for that particular embedded phone device, which is not terribly different from the wealth of customization for similar devices already in the public.
In other words, complying with the terms of the GPL would cost Skype less than pursuing this case.
They're stupid, or crazy. If eBay can't rein them in, what about eBay stockholders?
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
OK, forgive me if I'm wrong here, but I thought the whole purpose of antitrust legislation was to crack down on things that discourage competition.
What in the GPL discourages competition? Nothing. You can make your own competing programs all you want. You may not be able to use GPL'd code without also releasing your source, but this is irrelevant: no one complains when Coke doesn't let Pepsi use the Coke recipes.
Even if that were a legitimate complaint, however, it would still be irrelevant. There is plenty of competition, even among GPL'd software. Consider the myriad Linux distributions, to give an example of entire businesses that compete with one another despite using GPL'd products. If Skype wants to compete with Linux using some kind of "Skynux," they too are free to do so. All they have to do is comply with the license.
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.
IMO, this case from the Skype point of view, is more about protecting the hardware from what one might call "rogue" firmware developers. Compared to SIP based hardware, Skype-only equipment is very cheap. If a new firmware image could be built for the phone, it would be incredibly easy to use the phones with Asterisk rather than the intended Skype, simply by replacing the phone application with something that speaks SIP, since the hardware access pieces of the software would fall under the GPL, being part of the OS.
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
The GPL doesn't violate anything, but even if they did manage to get the License declared illegal in some way... They would still be using someone else's copyrighted code without a license. GPL is the only thing that grants you the right to distribute copies, if you throw it out then you've got nothing to stand on. After all the other cases, I still find it amazing that people don't understand this.
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.
There's a whole raft of problems with this argument. Here's my short list. Feel free to add your own.
- * The GPL isn't a monopoly. There's plenty of competition for software out there, including a convicted monopolist.
- * GPL code cannot be priced up if a monopoly is ever achieved. The terms of the GPL prohibit charging for GPL code ever, so real predatory pricing is precluded.
- * The antitrust laws have been gutted by a series of court cases. One of the "new" standards is harm to the consumer, an almost impossible to prove issue. (So, how do you know Netscape wouldn't have gone bankrupt anyway?) While Microsoft has benefited from this standard, it also will require Skype to prove that giving away software for free harms the consumer.
That's my short list. Like I said, please feel free to add your own.===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
The GPL is *NOT* an EULA! It's a DISTRIBUTION license!!!
I know their service appears to be superior to traditional POTS and mainstream VoIP offerings, but they still suck. You're locked into a proprietary protocol that doesn't interact with anyone else's apps, and the crypto is "fake" (in the sense that Skype is always the trusted introducer for key exchange, and is therefore subject to coercion by, say, governments).
Kill this app. The "free" calling seems neat, but this isn't what we really need. Like the iPhone, it's a good demo of the future, but everyone loses if the actual product is the future.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"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.