Maybe I'm cynical, but I believe that legal decisions hinge more on the
size of the legal budget than the logic of the legal wording. So given a
contest between, say, Nokia (earlier post reported they ship a modified
IPF, plus they have money, thus are more likely to be a target than OpenBSD
project itself if an injunction were to be sought) and Darren, I'd bet on
the corporate lawyers.
More seriously, I think they'd have several legitimate arguments that might
outweigh the changed wording. For one thing, the licence that was posted
here earlier (thanks, Jeff!) was very simplistic, and permitted
"Redistribution and use in source...form" which arguably could be
interpreted to mean that modification was included as a fair use,
especially in light of the fact that it is a *very* well-known issue as
common practice, and was not specifically prohibited. IANAL but I believe
a licence is a contract and contracts cannot be unilaterally modified post
facto. So I'm not convinced this is as serious a problem for previous
releases as the recent comments indicate.
It is a serious problem for Nokia et al however, because it destroys their
upgrade path. I'd bet there is some serious lawyering going on within
those corporate structures right now - wonder if Wall Street has gotten
wind of this yet? Might be a good idea to short some of those affected
companies in the after-hours market! (If you do, I want a cut of the
profits - that idea is copyright Lowell Bruce McCulley, all rights reserved
including derivitive trading strategies :-)
Just MHO, fwiw.
--Bruce McCulley
Stephen Ryan wrote:
> I've noticed a bunch of people thinking that the license on IPF was
> changed from BSD to something else. IPF was never under the BSD
> license. It was under something that superficially looked a lot like
> the BSD license, but never granted the right to modify ("create derived
> works"). The license isn't being changed retroactively, only
> clarified. The problems is that people ASSumed something about
> it that wasn't true; just because it LOOKED like the BSD license
> doesn't means it WAS the BSD license.
>
> OpenBSD is, in fact, (slightly) screwed over this one, because they
> can't legally ship with IPF; in contrast to what a previous poster
> stated, they do not have 6 months; I bet Darren could get an injunction
> to stop them from shipping, too, if he wanted to. BTW, this is because
> OpenBSD has modified IPF, and that is explicitly contrary to the IPF
> license. If they were using vanilla, out-of-the-box shipping IPF,
> they'd be cool, with nothing to worry about. The reason it was removed
> is because they need to modify it to get it to work properly with
> OpenBSD, and they're not allowed to. The -current version, with the
> "No redistribution allowed" is a red herring. The real problem (which
> Theo et.al. have correctly identified) is that they are not allowed to
> modify it according to the license. Furthermore, because they now very
> publicly know about this, it would count as wilful copyright violation,
> which carries significantly larger penalties.
>
> My guess? OpenBSD writes new firewall code and IPF goes the way of the
> dodo, only there are stuffed dodos in museums and IPF won't be
> preserved in that fashion. It will fade away, unloved, unsung,
> unmissed.
>
> The moral is that Debian is right: CHECK THE LICENSES!
> --
> Stephen Ryan Debian GNU/Linux
> Technology Coordinator
> Center for Educational Outcomes
> at Dartmouth College
>
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