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Bruce Perens Explains That 'GPL Is A Contract' Court Case (perens.com)
Bruce Perens co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond -- and he's also Slashdot reader #3,872. Bruce Perens writes:
There's been a lot of confusion about the recent Artifex v. Hancomcase, in which the court found that the GPL was an enforceable contract. I'm going to try to explain the whole thing in clear terms for the legal layman.
Two key quotes:
Two key quotes:
- "What has changed now is that for the purposes of the court, the GPL is both a license, which can be enforced through a claim of copyright infringement, and a contract, which can be enforced through a claim of breach of contract. You can allege both in your court claim in a single case, and fall back on one if you can't prove the other. Thus, the potential to enforce the GPL in court is somewhat stronger than before this finding, and you have a case to cite rather than spending time in court arguing whether the GPL is a contract or not..."
- "Another interesting point in the case is that the court found Artifex's claim of damages to be admissible because of their use of dual-licensing. An economic structure for remuneration of the developer by users who did not wish to comply with the GPL terms, and thus acquired a commercial license, was clearly present."
Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen wrote the GPL.
Please take your hate speech elsewhere.
Ethical BSD developers don't need GPL code, they write their own because they respect the fact that anyone who wrote GPL code is not okay with the idea of not getting back any improvements made to that code.
On the same note, ethical GPL developers don't relicense BSD code they happen to use, so that any fixes local only to the BSD source can be also shared with the BSD-only world. They both respect the idea that the original author who used BSD for the license doesn't mind if people use that code on closed-source products, and *also* stay true to the idea that one should always give back any improvements made to that code (by keeping it BSD so that the BSD people can use the improvement as well).
Lawyers call an agreement a contract.
The court has just affirmed what you said, Hancom publicly stated that they had agreed to the GPL. Thus there is a contract in place.
The contract has terms, defined by the GPL that Hancom agreed to. These terms were not complied with. Now we have a breach of contract.
Once a breach of contract has been established the case becomes much clearer, lots of existing case law which covers how it should be dealt with.
The logic of the court case isn't specific to the GPL, any licence you choose to distribute source with, or even a straight binary distribution would probably involve the creation of an implicit contract.
You shouldn't be scared of contracts, they are just a way for lawyers to formalise agreements. Buying a coffee - a contract. Buying a bus ticket - a contract. Agreeing to terms and conditions you never bothered to read - a contract.