The absence of a severability clause does not necessarily stop a court from altering the terms of a contract in all cases. However, there may be limits on how far a court can reform a contract without invalidating it, which having a severability clause (which is an express agreement of the parties to accept alterations, in effect) may extend, and a clause expressly voiding the contract if it its terms are unenforceable (a clause the GPLv2 also lacks) may restrict.
Convincing, well argued - and entirely irrelevant. The GPL is a license, not a contract. There are no mutually agreed terms, no goods or services exchanged for monies or in kind, no penalties for non-delivery, no exit clauses. It's just permission to do what you would normally not be allowed to do by law - in this case copy, modify and distribute someone else's copyrighted work with certain restrictions i.e. a license.
You gotta see the big picture here. It is an event for Microsoft to publicly admit that its latest offering is so bad that they'll help people downgrade. In the past, customers just had to bend over and pretend to like it.
Also I can't see a great deal of money coming in from Vista sales this year so Microsoft's numbers won't be that stellar either. This must be why its not spending a great deal of money on channel programmes for Vista. Down here at the tip of Africa, Microsoft has dithered for nearly eight months supporting its channel partners on Vista, forcing those who stopped selling XP late last year to go overseas for international support. Needless to say this costs a bomb.
...in his essay Anarchism Triumphant. I remember when I first read it sniggering at all the hooplah about numbers that could be copyrighted. But he was right after all:
Like everything else in the digital world, music as seen by a CD player is mere numeric information; a particular recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony recorded by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorale is (to drop a few insignificant digits) 1276749873424, while Glenn Gould's peculiarly perverse last recording of the Goldberg Variations is (similarly rather truncated) 767459083268.
Oddly enough, these two numbers are "copyrighted." This means, supposedly, that you can't possess another copy of these numbers, once fixed in any physical form, unless you have licensed them. And you can't turn 767459083268 into 2347895697 for your friends (thus correcting Gould's ridiculous judgment about tempi) without making a "derivative work," for which a license is necessary.
At the same time, a similar optical storage disk contains another number, let us call it 7537489532. This one is an algorithm for linear programming of large systems with multiple constraints, useful for example if you want to make optimal use of your rolling stock in running a freight railroad. This number (in the U.S.) is "patented," which means you cannot derive 7537489532 for yourself, or otherwise "practice the art" of the patent with respect to solving linear programming problems no matter how you came by the idea, including finding it out for yourself, unless you have a license from the number's owner.
Then there's 9892454959483. This one is the source code for Microsoft Word. In addition to being "copyrighted," this one is a trade secret. That means if you take this number from Microsoft and give it to anyone else you can be punished.
Lastly, there's 588832161316. It doesn't do anything, it's just the square of 767354. As far as I know, it isn't owned by anybody under any of these rubrics. Yet.
PJ explains in the final para of TFA what Summary Judgements are for:
Keep in mind that the real point of summary judgment motions at this stage of a case is to narrow down what issues need a trial and which can be decided by the judge as a matter of law. So while Novell can win these motions, in a sense it can't lose anything by them. The worst that happens is that it all goes forward to trial. The whole idea is that after discovery, you kind of know what should be excised from the case, and both sides normally file dispositive motions right after discovery, so that everyone knows what is still viable and still needs to go to trial, if anything.
Yesterday, in fact, I got windows XP running within Ubuntu (My current project requires it) and it was easy, free and very slick. This means I can convert my last remaining dual-boot computers (because of games, mostly) over to Linux.
Sure. It's from Goodfellas, probably the best mafia film ever made. The commentary track on the DVD features the real Henry Hill talking about his life as dramatised by Scorcese in the film. He comes to the same conclusion you do for the same reasons - it's no kind of life for anyone.
Excellent post. I'm reminded of this famous monologue:
Henry Hill: [narrating] Now the guy's got Paulie as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with the bill? He can go to Paulie. Trouble with the cops, deliveries, Tommy, he can call Paulie. But now the guy's gotta come up with Paulie's money every week no matter what. Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning huh? Fuck you, pay me."
Doom's original native IPX support put out 100 packets per second before it was patched, more than enough to slow down the network to a crawl when we played. Fazel our network admin would wander down to the basement and mutter "I can't understand it - every lunch time the network falls over!" It was a widespread phenomenon; I remember a Cisco VP mentioning "Doom policies" in an interview and how companies should have them.
We never owned up. Forgive me Fazel, wherever you are:)
Anyway, many of the practices and tenets of Pauline Christianity are based more on pre-Christian Dionysiac cults than on human sacrifice per se: the ideas of the sacrifice, tearing-apart, and eating of the god at a feast, of the god having an intensely personal relationship with the individual practitioner, the god dying in order to give eternal life to the practitioner, miracles etc at the birth of the god, and others, are basically Dionysiac.
This claim is complete nonsense as this essay makes clear. From the conclusion:
"Moreover, to make his argument persuasive, the claimant must explain how and why a group of Palestinian Jews borrowed the theology and teachings of a foreign cult and founded a new religion based upon them. He must also explain why the parallels between the doctrine taught by Jesus and that of contemporary Judaism were so similar, not to mention why the early Christians initially maintained the trappings of Jewish religious observation (Temple attendance, circumcision, etc.).
In fact, the only Apostle who might reasonably be expected to have had any reasonably detailed knowledge of pagan religion was the educated rabbi, Saul/Paul - and it utterly defies credibility that a professed and professing Pharisee, let alone a pupil of Gamaliel, would or even could have taken control of a group of Palestinian peasants and turned them into proselytising Messianic Bacchus-worshippers."
Lovely stuff. Is code that uses libraries such as Derelict usable from Pyd without running into thread lock issues? It would be great to write a games engine in D and call it from Python a la Pygame.
Actually I think it was the cleaning lady at the brothel in Rome who relayed to Yossarian that the MPs were saying that to her while they were trashing the place.
And if your Bible is missing that entire book, how can you be sure of what is actually said in so much as a single chapter and verse?
Personally, I though GP was being sarcastic, but you do have a very serious point about religion.
He doesn't actually. It is a huge jump to go from "there's a book missing" (which is entirely possible) to "every single chapter and verse is in doubt" which is nonsense given that we have thousands of copies of those chapters and verses, some of them dated to the early 2nd century AD. The New Testament documents can be reliably said to be intact, more than 99% so, and of those bits in doubt (a sentence here or there), none have the slightest effect on its major teachings.
If one were to take religion seriously, you must really consider the problem of the nature of Holy Books and man's interaction with them.
I couldn't agree more. Luckily there are established practices for studying all ancient literature - not just the Holy Books - and they include textual criticism, archaeology, sociology and dating methods.
So the question if god is all powerful then why does he fail at communication unless he tried several times and humans didn't get it right, which means the only group that is right is Islam considering they were the last of the big three (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) to get their word of god and they actually claim to have gotten their book directly from god and the book says you have to read it in Arabic to interpret it.
There's a credibility problem though. It's dead easy for someone to disappear and then return and claim "God appeared to me and here is his will for all of you." The problem with that is there's no way to check it out. Far more reliable would be multiple eyewitness testimonies composed over many years and thoroughly cross-checked with both friendly and hostile sources.
So what if the Cathar's were right and that the Catholic Bible was simply a political tool of the Papacy to bring the incorrect version of God's word to man. Obviously man has free will to do what he pleases (unless you believe in predestination like certain sects do) so the possibility that over the age's that man disobeyed God's will and changed the Bible to of man's own choosing is possible.
No it's not. I can compare my copy of the New Testament in Greek with the earliest dated copies of it (somewhere around 110AD) and bingo - they're the same. Case closed.
Disregarding science versus religion, there is a possibility the modern Bible is indeed not really God's true will and many Christians are actually worshiping it as an idol rather than what God really wants them to do.
How exactly could Christians know what God wants them to do if the Bible doesn't contain statements about what God wants them to do? Should they just make stuff up and follow that? On second thoughts, don't answer that...
Copyright law has nothing to say about use of a copyrighted work. It only covers copying, redistribution and making derivative works. Novell, Microsoft and other big companies can (and do) use Free Software all the time without violating the terms of the license.
It's only when they want to redistribute GPLed code that the license kicks in. And since by default, no-one can legally copy, modify or distribute someone else's copyrighted work, they must obey the terms of the license or face the copyright holders in court where they will lose.
So here's the situation: Novell has SuSe Linux, all released as Free Software under the GPL. None of its permissions or rights can be retroactively removed - it has permission to redistribute the software from here on in (I know that's debatable because of the patent end run but let's say it does). But GNU/Linux changes rapidly. Let's says SuSE uses glibc version 2.5 now. When the next major version, licensed under the GPL 3.0, is released with lots of bugfixes and better performance Novell will not be allowed to redistribute the code. It will have to stick with 2.5. It will have to use its own developers and its own resources to improve that code. Fast forward 18 months and Novell is still stuck with a bastardised old version of glibc while everyone else is enjoying version 3.5 or whatever the latest version is.
That is how Novell will get left behind. This is a serious, serious problem for the company. Major portions of its software will just be frozen in time (where the time is right now), barely improving, perhaps stuttering along. Novell can't seriously compete with the hundreds of thousands of developers around the world that improve Linux daily, now can it?
As I understand US law, a licence is contract. A specialised form of contract, but a contract nevertheless.
Wrong. A license in US law is just permission to do something you wouldn't normally otherwise be allowed to do under law. If you break the terms of the license, you will be asked to stop what you are doing otherwise you face prosecution under some other statute. If you ignore the terms of a fishing license for example you will be asked to stop otherwise you could face trespassing charges.
Similarly if you ignore the terms of the GPL, you will be asked to stop what you are doing or else go to court for copyright violation. You don't have any permission to copy, modify and distribute others' copyrighted works in the first place. The GPL gives you that permission but there are no pre-arranged terms, no promises of goods or services delivered for money paid and no penalties for violation since its not a contract. You might be thinking of the common-or-garden EULA which mixes contractual obligations in with copyright notices.
If we're talking about Free Software as in the FSF's definition, the free refers to freedom, not price. I used to make quite a nice living writing and selling Free Software.
It still sounds like a GPL violation to me. Now, we have to watch what FSF does. They own the C library that literally every program on Novell Linux uses. They have a reasonably strong case to enjoin Novell from distributing it, which would kill SuSE entirely. They have Red Hat to pay for the lawsuit.
I really hope you're right here Bruce. I also hope you have tons of pull with the FSF.
If you are arguing that Novell has licensed IP that covers a GPLed element of a Linux distribution, and cannot redistribute that code because it cannot sublicense that right to others (besides its customers), then you have conceded that Linux embodies infringing IP and that the community is obligated to remove that IP before the community may redistribute the code. Paragraph 7, contrary to the opinions of many, does not permit you to "wait" until IP such as a patent is "validated" in a court against a distributor defendant.
IP? What does that mean? There is no Microsoft-copyrighted code in Linux. Be specific. You mean software patents that only apply in the US? Well, hundreds of thousands of programmers outside of the US will happily ignore Microsoft's claims that they own the sole rights to the concept of adding integers using a CPU, or whatever patents it holds.
And besides, do you really think Microsoft will actually tell the community what patents it is that we are supposed to be infringing? Of course it won't because as soon as it does, Novell won't be able to satisfy the GPL any more and secondly, any offending code will probably be ripped out and rewritten overnight. Why do you think the agreement is just a covenant not to sue, rather than a detailed cross-licensing deal?
Far better for Microsoft to have some kind of vague threat that "Linux infringes our IP" than actually specify what it is.
Google is not run by fools. By inheriting YouTube's (fairly minor) legal hassles, they - and not someone else - get to decide what battles to fight and what to settle. Google has already done this with the library and book projects - picking and choosing their fights so that they get to determine what legal precedent is set. Some fights they won, some they lost but it was a lot better than sitting on the sidelines watching someone else being sued.
Video is going to make Google an absolute fortune in five years time. The last thing they wanted is someone with shallower pockets determining the legal landscape for them. The technology is not yet "commoditized and trivial" enough. But it won't take long and when it is, the legal and business environment will have been determined by Google itself and no-one else.
...is that if people want to add clickwraps, they're going to whether the GPL allows it or not.
The GPL has no legal force outside that granted by copyright law. It's just permission granted to you to copy, modify and distribute software you received under its terms. It has nothing to say about usage or clickwraps.
For those of you who are going to point me to this, it'd be great if it was still true...but from what I've read recently, Stallman's position on commercial software in any form seems to have changed to one of opposition.
Commercial software? What's that? Software you sell for money? Like the GPLed code I used to write and sell to make a tidy living? Or something else?
If the GPL was really a license all developers wanted, we wouldn't be seeing (at least conscious) violations.
Ahh, I see - so it's the GPL that's the problem when a company or an individual takes someone else's copyrighted code and disobeys the terms of the license. Thanks for clearing that up.
This is yet another logical inconsistency inherent in referring to this license as free. (unless of course you subscribe to the Stallmanite definition of that word, which I do not)
The FSF makes it quite clear over and over again that it means free as in freedom, not free as in price. It's a limitation of common English usage, not logic. Whether you want to see it or not has no effect on its legal force.
A license which genuinely allowed people to do what they wanted would not have or need a website like gpl-violations.org associated with it.
Indeed. Except the GPL is not, never has been and never will be a license that genuinely allows people to do what they want. No license is like that - by law there must be at least one restriction otherwise it's not a license.
This can be proven by the number of projects which have managed to survive and function well with non-copyleft licenses...or did until some of them caved to pressure from Stallman to "harmonise" their own licenses with the GPL)
Examples of such projects?
The bottom line is that for as long as the GPL legislates downstream use, it will continue to be violated, because legislation of downstream use (for good *or* bad) is not in accordance with the greater balance of human desire.
The GPL has nothing whatever to say about use. It only mentions redistribution. You might try learning a bit about the license before posting these diatribes of yours - it saves embarrassment. And the bottom line is that if somebody wants to redistribute someone else's copyrighted code without permission, they will find themselves in court - greater balance of human desire or not.
Ask yourself...and think long and hard about this. Do the FSF currently endorse that which you really want? It could be just me, but there honestly seems to have been a change in their behaviour in the last 2-3 years. The tone of the gnu.org site to me has become a lot more strident.
As opposed to the DRM manufacturers and proprietary software vendors who have become a lot more friendly and accommodating to their users. Oh wait...
Not only is Linux becoming more popular anyway, but with the Vista release looming, and Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage and other DRM having been reported as being parts of it, I wouldn't be surprised to find that Stallman (at least secretly) could feel as though he potentially has almost the entire computer using population of the planet over a barrel right now.
Yeah, so totally over a barrel it's unbearable. What a horrible threat it is too: "Here's billions of dollars worth of code that you can use, study, learn from. add to, copy, modify and distribute to your heart's content with the sole restriction that you can't forbid these freedoms to anyone else."
Vendors like IBM, HP and Dell that make hundreds of millions of dollars doing this must be really crying for mercy...
Slashdot Mirror
The absence of a severability clause does not necessarily stop a court from altering the terms of a contract in all cases. However, there may be limits on how far a court can reform a contract without invalidating it, which having a severability clause (which is an express agreement of the parties to accept alterations, in effect) may extend, and a clause expressly voiding the contract if it its terms are unenforceable (a clause the GPLv2 also lacks) may restrict.
Convincing, well argued - and entirely irrelevant. The GPL is a license, not a contract. There are no mutually agreed terms, no goods or services exchanged for monies or in kind, no penalties for non-delivery, no exit clauses. It's just permission to do what you would normally not be allowed to do by law - in this case copy, modify and distribute someone else's copyrighted work with certain restrictions i.e. a license.
You gotta see the big picture here. It is an event for Microsoft to publicly admit that its latest offering is so bad that they'll help people downgrade. In the past, customers just had to bend over and pretend to like it.
Also I can't see a great deal of money coming in from Vista sales this year so Microsoft's numbers won't be that stellar either. This must be why its not spending a great deal of money on channel programmes for Vista. Down here at the tip of Africa, Microsoft has dithered for nearly eight months supporting its channel partners on Vista, forcing those who stopped selling XP late last year to go overseas for international support. Needless to say this costs a bomb.
Heh. Reminds me of Dave Barry's Enron Q & A in plain English.
Q. Doesn't Enron have a board of directors whose members are responsible for overseeing the corporation?
A. Yes. They are paid $300,000 a year.
Q. So how could they have allowed this flagrant deception to go on?
A. They are paid $300,000 a year.
...in his essay Anarchism Triumphant. I remember when I first read it sniggering at all the hooplah about numbers that could be copyrighted. But he was right after all:
Like everything else in the digital world, music as seen by a CD player is mere numeric information; a particular recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony recorded by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorale is (to drop a few insignificant digits) 1276749873424, while Glenn Gould's peculiarly perverse last recording of the Goldberg Variations is (similarly rather truncated) 767459083268.
Oddly enough, these two numbers are "copyrighted." This means, supposedly, that you can't possess another copy of these numbers, once fixed in any physical form, unless you have licensed them. And you can't turn 767459083268 into 2347895697 for your friends (thus correcting Gould's ridiculous judgment about tempi) without making a "derivative work," for which a license is necessary.
At the same time, a similar optical storage disk contains another number, let us call it 7537489532. This one is an algorithm for linear programming of large systems with multiple constraints, useful for example if you want to make optimal use of your rolling stock in running a freight railroad. This number (in the U.S.) is "patented," which means you cannot derive 7537489532 for yourself, or otherwise "practice the art" of the patent with respect to solving linear programming problems no matter how you came by the idea, including finding it out for yourself, unless you have a license from the number's owner.
Then there's 9892454959483. This one is the source code for Microsoft Word. In addition to being "copyrighted," this one is a trade secret. That means if you take this number from Microsoft and give it to anyone else you can be punished.
Lastly, there's 588832161316. It doesn't do anything, it's just the square of 767354. As far as I know, it isn't owned by anybody under any of these rubrics. Yet.
PJ explains in the final para of TFA what Summary Judgements are for:
Keep in mind that the real point of summary judgment motions at this stage of a case is to narrow down what issues need a trial and which can be decided by the judge as a matter of law. So while Novell can win these motions, in a sense it can't lose anything by them. The worst that happens is that it all goes forward to trial. The whole idea is that after discovery, you kind of know what should be excised from the case, and both sides normally file dispositive motions right after discovery, so that everyone knows what is still viable and still needs to go to trial, if anything.
Yesterday, in fact, I got windows XP running within Ubuntu (My current project requires it) and it was easy, free and very slick. This means I can convert my last remaining dual-boot computers (because of games, mostly) over to Linux.
What did you use for this? Vmware?
In other words: in Soviet Russia, Slashdot contributes to you!
might i ask where it is from? ;-)
Sure. It's from Goodfellas, probably the best mafia film ever made. The commentary track on the DVD features the real Henry Hill talking about his life as dramatised by Scorcese in the film. He comes to the same conclusion you do for the same reasons - it's no kind of life for anyone.
Excellent post. I'm reminded of this famous monologue:
Henry Hill: [narrating] Now the guy's got Paulie as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with the bill? He can go to Paulie. Trouble with the cops, deliveries, Tommy, he can call Paulie. But now the guy's gotta come up with Paulie's money every week no matter what. Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning huh? Fuck you, pay me."
Doom's original native IPX support put out 100 packets per second before it was patched, more than enough to slow down the network to a crawl when we played. Fazel our network admin would wander down to the basement and mutter "I can't understand it - every lunch time the network falls over!" It was a widespread phenomenon; I remember a Cisco VP mentioning "Doom policies" in an interview and how companies should have them.
:)
We never owned up. Forgive me Fazel, wherever you are
Anyway, many of the practices and tenets of Pauline Christianity are based more on pre-Christian Dionysiac cults than on human sacrifice per se: the ideas of the sacrifice, tearing-apart, and eating of the god at a feast, of the god having an intensely personal relationship with the individual practitioner, the god dying in order to give eternal life to the practitioner, miracles etc at the birth of the god, and others, are basically Dionysiac.
This claim is complete nonsense as this essay makes clear. From the conclusion:
"Moreover, to make his argument persuasive, the claimant must explain how and why a group of Palestinian Jews borrowed the theology and teachings of a foreign cult and founded a new religion based upon them. He must also explain why the parallels between the doctrine taught by Jesus and that of contemporary Judaism were so similar, not to mention why the early Christians initially maintained the trappings of Jewish religious observation (Temple attendance, circumcision, etc.).
In fact, the only Apostle who might reasonably be expected to have had any reasonably detailed knowledge of pagan religion was the educated rabbi, Saul/Paul - and it utterly defies credibility that a professed and professing Pharisee, let alone a pupil of Gamaliel, would or even could have taken control of a group of Palestinian peasants and turned them into proselytising Messianic Bacchus-worshippers."
Lovely stuff. Is code that uses libraries such as Derelict usable from Pyd without running into thread lock issues? It would be great to write a games engine in D and call it from Python a la Pygame.
Actually I think it was the cleaning lady at the brothel in Rome who relayed to Yossarian that the MPs were saying that to her while they were trashing the place.
And if your Bible is missing that entire book, how can you be sure of what is actually said in so much as a single chapter and verse?
Personally, I though GP was being sarcastic, but you do have a very serious point about religion.
He doesn't actually. It is a huge jump to go from "there's a book missing" (which is entirely possible) to "every single chapter and verse is in doubt" which is nonsense given that we have thousands of copies of those chapters and verses, some of them dated to the early 2nd century AD. The New Testament documents can be reliably said to be intact, more than 99% so, and of those bits in doubt (a sentence here or there), none have the slightest effect on its major teachings.
If one were to take religion seriously, you must really consider the problem of the nature of Holy Books and man's interaction with them.
I couldn't agree more. Luckily there are established practices for studying all ancient literature - not just the Holy Books - and they include textual criticism, archaeology, sociology and dating methods.
So the question if god is all powerful then why does he fail at communication unless he tried several times and humans didn't get it right, which means the only group that is right is Islam considering they were the last of the big three (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) to get their word of god and they actually claim to have gotten their book directly from god and the book says you have to read it in Arabic to interpret it.
There's a credibility problem though. It's dead easy for someone to disappear and then return and claim "God appeared to me and here is his will for all of you." The problem with that is there's no way to check it out. Far more reliable would be multiple eyewitness testimonies composed over many years and thoroughly cross-checked with both friendly and hostile sources.
So what if the Cathar's were right and that the Catholic Bible was simply a political tool of the Papacy to bring the incorrect version of God's word to man. Obviously man has free will to do what he pleases (unless you believe in predestination like certain sects do) so the possibility that over the age's that man disobeyed God's will and changed the Bible to of man's own choosing is possible.
No it's not. I can compare my copy of the New Testament in Greek with the earliest dated copies of it (somewhere around 110AD) and bingo - they're the same. Case closed.
Disregarding science versus religion, there is a possibility the modern Bible is indeed not really God's true will and many Christians are actually worshiping it as an idol rather than what God really wants them to do.
How exactly could Christians know what God wants them to do if the Bible doesn't contain statements about what God wants them to do? Should they just make stuff up and follow that? On second thoughts, don't answer that...
If you're in the Southern Hemisphere, turn around first :)
Wasn't it René Magritte?
If that doesn't SCREAM old, I don't what does
If it gets you from A to B, then who cares what others think?
Copyright law has nothing to say about use of a copyrighted work. It only covers copying, redistribution and making derivative works. Novell, Microsoft and other big companies can (and do) use Free Software all the time without violating the terms of the license.
It's only when they want to redistribute GPLed code that the license kicks in. And since by default, no-one can legally copy, modify or distribute someone else's copyrighted work, they must obey the terms of the license or face the copyright holders in court where they will lose.
So here's the situation: Novell has SuSe Linux, all released as Free Software under the GPL. None of its permissions or rights can be retroactively removed - it has permission to redistribute the software from here on in (I know that's debatable because of the patent end run but let's say it does). But GNU/Linux changes rapidly. Let's says SuSE uses glibc version 2.5 now. When the next major version, licensed under the GPL 3.0, is released with lots of bugfixes and better performance Novell will not be allowed to redistribute the code. It will have to stick with 2.5. It will have to use its own developers and its own resources to improve that code. Fast forward 18 months and Novell is still stuck with a bastardised old version of glibc while everyone else is enjoying version 3.5 or whatever the latest version is.
That is how Novell will get left behind. This is a serious, serious problem for the company. Major portions of its software will just be frozen in time (where the time is right now), barely improving, perhaps stuttering along. Novell can't seriously compete with the hundreds of thousands of developers around the world that improve Linux daily, now can it?
As I understand US law, a licence is contract. A specialised form of contract, but a contract nevertheless.
Wrong. A license in US law is just permission to do something you wouldn't normally otherwise be allowed to do under law. If you break the terms of the license, you will be asked to stop what you are doing otherwise you face prosecution under some other statute. If you ignore the terms of a fishing license for example you will be asked to stop otherwise you could face trespassing charges.
Similarly if you ignore the terms of the GPL, you will be asked to stop what you are doing or else go to court for copyright violation. You don't have any permission to copy, modify and distribute others' copyrighted works in the first place. The GPL gives you that permission but there are no pre-arranged terms, no promises of goods or services delivered for money paid and no penalties for violation since its not a contract. You might be thinking of the common-or-garden EULA which mixes contractual obligations in with copyright notices.
If we're talking about Free Software as in the FSF's definition, the free refers to freedom, not price. I used to make quite a nice living writing and selling Free Software.
It still sounds like a GPL violation to me. Now, we have to watch what FSF does. They own the C library that literally every program on Novell Linux uses. They have a reasonably strong case to enjoin Novell from distributing it, which would kill SuSE entirely. They have Red Hat to pay for the lawsuit.
I really hope you're right here Bruce. I also hope you have tons of pull with the FSF.
If you are arguing that Novell has licensed IP that covers a GPLed element of a Linux distribution, and cannot redistribute that code because it cannot sublicense that right to others (besides its customers), then you have conceded that Linux embodies infringing IP and that the community is obligated to remove that IP before the community may redistribute the code. Paragraph 7, contrary to the opinions of many, does not permit you to "wait" until IP such as a patent is "validated" in a court against a distributor defendant.
IP? What does that mean? There is no Microsoft-copyrighted code in Linux. Be specific. You mean software patents that only apply in the US? Well, hundreds of thousands of programmers outside of the US will happily ignore Microsoft's claims that they own the sole rights to the concept of adding integers using a CPU, or whatever patents it holds.
And besides, do you really think Microsoft will actually tell the community what patents it is that we are supposed to be infringing? Of course it won't because as soon as it does, Novell won't be able to satisfy the GPL any more and secondly, any offending code will probably be ripped out and rewritten overnight. Why do you think the agreement is just a covenant not to sue, rather than a detailed cross-licensing deal?
Far better for Microsoft to have some kind of vague threat that "Linux infringes our IP" than actually specify what it is.
Google is not run by fools. By inheriting YouTube's (fairly minor) legal hassles, they - and not someone else - get to decide what battles to fight and what to settle. Google has already done this with the library and book projects - picking and choosing their fights so that they get to determine what legal precedent is set. Some fights they won, some they lost but it was a lot better than sitting on the sidelines watching someone else being sued.
Video is going to make Google an absolute fortune in five years time. The last thing they wanted is someone with shallower pockets determining the legal landscape for them. The technology is not yet "commoditized and trivial" enough. But it won't take long and when it is, the legal and business environment will have been determined by Google itself and no-one else.
Not perhaps: "move the fleet away from the Death Star" ?
...is that if people want to add clickwraps, they're going to whether the GPL allows it or not.
The GPL has no legal force outside that granted by copyright law. It's just permission granted to you to copy, modify and distribute software you received under its terms. It has nothing to say about usage or clickwraps.
For those of you who are going to point me to this, it'd be great if it was still true...but from what I've read recently, Stallman's position on commercial software in any form seems to have changed to one of opposition.
Commercial software? What's that? Software you sell for money? Like the GPLed code I used to write and sell to make a tidy living? Or something else?
If the GPL was really a license all developers wanted, we wouldn't be seeing (at least conscious) violations.
Ahh, I see - so it's the GPL that's the problem when a company or an individual takes someone else's copyrighted code and disobeys the terms of the license. Thanks for clearing that up.
This is yet another logical inconsistency inherent in referring to this license as free. (unless of course you subscribe to the Stallmanite definition of that word, which I do not)
The FSF makes it quite clear over and over again that it means free as in freedom, not free as in price. It's a limitation of common English usage, not logic. Whether you want to see it or not has no effect on its legal force.
A license which genuinely allowed people to do what they wanted would not have or need a website like gpl-violations.org associated with it.
Indeed. Except the GPL is not, never has been and never will be a license that genuinely allows people to do what they want. No license is like that - by law there must be at least one restriction otherwise it's not a license.
This can be proven by the number of projects which have managed to survive and function well with non-copyleft licenses...or did until some of them caved to pressure from Stallman to "harmonise" their own licenses with the GPL)
Examples of such projects?
The bottom line is that for as long as the GPL legislates downstream use, it will continue to be violated, because legislation of downstream use (for good *or* bad) is not in accordance with the greater balance of human desire.
The GPL has nothing whatever to say about use. It only mentions redistribution. You might try learning a bit about the license before posting these diatribes of yours - it saves embarrassment. And the bottom line is that if somebody wants to redistribute someone else's copyrighted code without permission, they will find themselves in court - greater balance of human desire or not.
Ask yourself...and think long and hard about this. Do the FSF currently endorse that which you really want? It could be just me, but there honestly seems to have been a change in their behaviour in the last 2-3 years. The tone of the gnu.org site to me has become a lot more strident.
As opposed to the DRM manufacturers and proprietary software vendors who have become a lot more friendly and accommodating to their users. Oh wait...
Not only is Linux becoming more popular anyway, but with the Vista release looming, and Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage and other DRM having been reported as being parts of it, I wouldn't be surprised to find that Stallman (at least secretly) could feel as though he potentially has almost the entire computer using population of the planet over a barrel right now.
Yeah, so totally over a barrel it's unbearable. What a horrible threat it is too: "Here's billions of dollars worth of code that you can use, study, learn from. add to, copy, modify and distribute to your heart's content with the sole restriction that you can't forbid these freedoms to anyone else."
Vendors like IBM, HP and Dell that make hundreds of millions of dollars doing this must be really crying for mercy...