On Tue, 21 Jun 2011, Marc-André Moreau wrote:

Here's what I propose:

Since none of us are real lawyers, we can go on like this forever. I will work on getting the necessary funding for hiring a real lawyer, who will come in and provide legal advice on the matter.

Would that be considered a way to resolve the conflict and satisfy both ends?

I appreciate your concerns for doing things right, but we need to get over this at some point and move on. A lot of energy has already been put onto this.

You must understand that there is no such thing as a universal truth. As others have pointed out, different jurisdictions have differens laws, and different courts may judge differently. However, we still believe that most of them will agree with Otavio:s summary:

"Because even if we remove all code from Cendio from source it will
still be a derivated work."

A real lawyer can provide another opinion, which can certainly be useful, especially if he has open source and copyright experience. Perhaps you should consider hiring someone from SFLC?

But still, yet another opinion can only lower the uncertainties; it can never guarantee that a future trial will come to a different conclusion. This means that the legal status of future Apache licensed FreeRDP releases would always be somewhat uncertain.

Our business model is to work closely with different free software and open source projects, contributing in many ways, and being good open source citizens. We believe that GPL, and especially GPLv3, is a very good license (http://www.cendio.com/aboutus/press/2007/005.xhtml). I'd like to emphasize that we are not interested in taking this to court at this time, but of course a future company board may think otherwise. Also we cannot speak for the non-Cendio copyright holders which haven't agreed to the change.

We do understand that many companies are interested in a FreeRDP release without a copyleft license. Companies loves advanced software that they can do whatever they want with. But we are arguing that this would be "too good to be true": Despite the low activity in the rdesktop project before the fork, the software still represents a highly valuable piece of software. This is largely because of Matt Chapman and others, but Cendio also contributed heavily to it. We did this because the GPL license guaranteed copyleft; it guaranteed that no company could use it for profit without giving back. This explains why we do not want to switch to a non-copyleft license.


Best regards, ---
Peter Åstrand           ThinLinc Chief Developer
Cendio AB               http://www.cendio.com
Wallenbergs gata 4
583 30 Linköping        Phone: +46-13-21 46 00
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