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| Authored by: Ian Al on Thursday, October 18 2012 @ 02:53 AM EDT |
GPL V2 says:
1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies
of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you
conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright
notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to
this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients
of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.
So,
RedHat would have given any recipients of the Program a copy of the GPL V2
licence with the program.
Mark reported that,
In
paragraph 38 et. seq. Twin Peaks denies sufficient information to admit that the
GPLv2 places restrictions on distribution. Twin Peaks denies sufficient
information to admit the very provisions of the GPLv2 that Red Hat cites. In
paragraph 45 Twin Peaks denies that the program in question (util-linux and the
"mount" program) are licensed under GPLv2.
The way I see all this,
Twin Peaks either lacks sufficient information to know that there was a licence
and wilfully infringes on the copyright or Twin Peaks has the entire wording of
the licence and don't know what it means.
I wonder if they are going
to claim that their client only read the source code and not the copyright
notice demanded by the GPL and the copy of the GPL licence text. Since copyright
exists the moment the creative expression hits the page, that would be a
dangerous admission.
Perhaps they are going to claim that, of course
they and their client read the licence, but neither of them understood the legal
meaning of the licence terms. In that case, the client needs better lawyers and
the client did not know what it was licensed to do and wilfully infringed the
copyright.
I would have thought that it would have been better to just
deny that the GPL says what it says and is a licence to freely use the software.
At least that ends up with a detailed argument about the legal meaning of the
terms.
This all feels like lawyers digging a deeper
hole.
---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid! [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 18 2012 @ 04:26 AM EDT |
38. Twin Peaks admits that in Wallace v. Int’l Bus. Machines Corp.,
467 F.3d 1104, 1105 (7th Cir. 2006), Judge Easterbrook stated: “Copyright law,
usually the basis of limiting reproduction in order to collect a fee, ensures
that open-source software remains free: any attempt to sell a derivative work
will violate the copyright laws, even if the improver has not accepted the
GPL.” ... (emphasis added)
It perfectly permissible to sell a
derivative work of GPLv2 and GPLv3 (I don't know about other versions) licensed
software. The obligations are to license the derivative under the same license
(or newer) and to provide source code.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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