On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 7:39 AM, Peter Åstrand <astr...@cendio.se> wrote:
> 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?
>
I have contacted the SFLC, and they have denied my request due to lack of
time and resources. The SFLC is non-profit, so we cannot "hire" someone from
them. It is a free service, but they seem are too busy right now to look at
our case.
A real lawyer with copyright experience should not necessarily "provide
another opinion", but provide an *expert's opinion*, which is quite
different from you and me trying to interpret the law. I'm not saying it is
an absolute truth, but an expert's opinion is still stronger and more
reliable, otherwise we wouldn't call it an expert.
>
> 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.
>
This is still to be determined. I doubt our "future will always be somewhat
uncertain", we will settle the matter with a lawyer.
>
> 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<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.
>
For Cendio copyright, you are currently in position of accepting the license
change for "whatever could have been left in our code base". We wouldn't ask
you to change the license on rdesktop, since we believe none of your
copyright is left in our code base. You'd basically be granting us rights on
the parts of code which are unproven to exist as of yet, to relieve us from
the uncertainty that you're talking about. I respect your position regarding
the GPL, but in this case willingly wanting to leave uncertainty on us is
not necessarily considered a "friendly" approach. We're doing our best to
respect your copyright and your choice of not accepting the license change,
I would expect a minimum effort and good will from your side in return. We
believe none of your IP is left in our code base, this is only an extra
measure to remove this uncertainty. Are you willing to make that move for
the good of both projects?
>
> 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.
>
Actually, not true. ThinLinc is not 100% free software, so the GPL is not a
guaranteed copyleft in all cases. Numerous companies have made proprietary
extensions to rdesktop despite the fact that it was GPL. As for the level of
activity of FreeRDP vs rdesktop, you must be truly blind not to see that
rdesktop is dead and FreeRDP is the future. Licensing has a lot to do with
it. If you think that GPL makes sense for a project like rdesktop, then let
it be: continue forward with the rdesktop project, I have absolutely no
problem with that. FreeRDP will simply be a completely separate project
under the Apache license. In all cases, this licensing scenario should put
you in an interesting position, since Apache is GPL compatible. You could
reuse libraries from FreeRDP, such as our RemoteFX decoder library.
There is no space, however, for *two* GPL projects. If you believe there is
space for both a GPL and an Apache RDP client, then let rdesktop be the GPL
client, and FreeRDP the Apache client. Your choice, but there is high demand
for an Apache-licensed RDP client, that's what I can tell.
Best regards,
- Marc-Andre
>
>
> 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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