Speaking of people who will be pretty pissed when it turns out that Eben Moglen has been bullshitting about the legal meaning of the GPL all along:
http://trends.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/02/11/2216239&tid=147 But for better or for worse, Mr. Wallace doesn't seem to have a terribly firm grasp of the applicable law, either. Not unless he's got quite a bit more evidence of restraint of trade up his sleeve. I think it very likely (IANAL) that he could obtain declarative relief for the asking with respect to the FSF's assertions regarding linking, etc. But it's not that easy to get a judgment under the Clayton Act (actually, Robinson-Patman Act, if he is claiming injury to an individual competitor; see Chroma v. GTE Products). I think he's going to have to show either that the FSF offers, in some sense, lower prices to other people that it does to him, or that it engages in predatory pricing. The former is going to be pretty hard to prove -- especially once the linking claim is demolished, and he can hook his pretty GUI into GDB if he wants, like Wind River does -- and the latter is going to take more research into facts about pricing and linked products than he's likely to do (see, for instance, Kentmaster Manufacturing v. Jarvis). Of course, I could be biased; I'm pro-non-crack-smoking-GPL and I think a business model based on maintenance and upgrade service is saner that software licensing to begin with, with few exceptions (such as the DXO Capture example I ranted about a few months ago). So Mr. Wallace can probably drag the FSF through the mud, shine some light on their business practices with respect to selective enforcement of the GPL (do you think they harass Wind River about the boundaries of a derivative work?), and generally destroy Eben Moglen's credibility (I am guessing, IANAL, we'll see). But I think it improbable that he will get a dime out of it. Of course, it's possible that the court will examine the GPL and agree with Mr. Wallace that there is no way to construe it that licenses distribution of all those derivative works (yes, he appears also to have spotted the "agency to sublicense" problem). If so, I have no idea what is going to happen to GPL projects without copyright assignment policies. Not that they suddenly become "undistributable"; just that people will wake up to the risk of getting SCOed by somebody who actually does have copyright on a non-trivial bit of the Linux kernel or something. If GPL section 6 is struck and thus the GPL can't actually be relied upon as an affirmative defense against infringement when distributing a derivative work, we're all stuck with some feeble estoppel / reliance based argument. Blecch. Cheers, - Michael
