Hi, since we are already off topic, I can't resist the philosophical nit-picking:
On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 05:27:38PM +0100, David Chisnall wrote: > Company A spins out company B. > Company A ships product A, which uses a third-party GPL'd product and > provides new interfaces. > Company B ships a proprietary product that uses these new interfaces. > Company A is complying with the GPL with respect to the upstream product. > Company B is violating the GPL, but only with respect to Company B's > product. Their product is not a derived work of the original, and is > not shipped with the original, so only Company A has standing to sue. This is interesting from a ontological perspective: For this approach to work, you need to claim that is_derivative_work_of is intransitive. Is that universally accepted? I can easily imaging cases where common sense reasoning would dictate that when C is a derivative work of B and B of A, C also is a derivative work of A. (e.g. let A be some unpublished manuscript, B an edition thereof and C a translation of the edition). That doesn't go to say that is_derivative_work_of is necessarily transitive, but I the issue seems to call for a decision on a case-by-case basis. (But then again, common sense is known to be easily contradicted, so feel free to disagree.) That being said, I totally agree with the whole "read less legalese, write more code" pitch and I think we have a very sensible licensing policy in place for Étoilé, at least for my non-fundamentalist taste. Niels *drops two cents into the off-topic jar* _______________________________________________ Etoile-dev mailing list Etoile-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev
