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| Authored by: tknarr on Tuesday, July 03 2012 @ 07:40 PM EDT |
IANAL, but IMO Shuttleworth here is misstating what the FSF said. They didn't
say they wouldn't sue him. They made a flat statement that the license their
software was given to him under, that they wrote, doesn't give them the right to
sue him. And as we've seen noted in various court cases, once a party has relied
on a promise by an entity then even if later management changes their minds they
can't undo that promise or make themselves not bound by it.
And I think
the FSF's position is logical. Shuttleworth's company is distributing the
software to OEMs. The OEMs get signed binaries and the keys needed to verify
them. They also get all the tools needed to generate their own keys and sign
binaries, which is what you need to create and run modified versions of the
software. They do not receive the hardware or the BIOS code from
Shuttleworth. So if the OEM chooses hardware that won't let the end user load
their own keys in, rendering it impossible to run modified binaries and
violating the GPLv3's terms, how can the OEMs possibly put Shuttleworth on the
hook? If they tried, he could response "I did provide everything needed to run
modified binaries. The parts that now require more than I provided are the parts
of the system I didn't give to you. The hardware and BIOS are your
additions to the system, you comply with the license terms.". Think about
this: if I create a piece of GPL'd software and you add functionality to it and
distribute it, am I on the hook if my distributions fail to include your source
code? No. Same thing. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, July 03 2012 @ 07:41 PM EDT |
And if SFLC says that, then I understand Ubuntu's position.
It's the same problem as the covered-by-the-GPL2-or-later
problem, which assumes that future versions of the GPL will
respect the same boundaries as GPL2. But, for instance, a
future version might be more Affero-like as conditions
change. We can't know what changes the future will bring.
All we can do is trust.
Personally, I think that the FSF has proved trustworthy, but
I understand Ubuntu's reluctance given that part of GPL3 was
by design to make sure that you could not be locked out by a
vendor, but if you are making use of UEFI, then disclosing
your private key is the very last thing you want to do
because it would invalidate all the security that UEFI
ensures.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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