Lowell Bruce McCulley said:
>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.
Depends on how clear the law is, but yes, money can and does play a part.
Also, Nokia could certainly afford to pay Darren for rights to modify the
code.
>
>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.
Well, under Fair Use, you DON'T have a right to redistribute modified
versions of the code. However, you do have the right to modify for
personal use. This is DJB's arguement for not open-sourcing his stuff -
someone is legally allowed to distribute patches separate from his code,
and you legally can apply those patches. You just can't deliver the
patches together, nor can you deliver the patched code.
The issue is that under copyright law, you only get fair use rights. All
other rights belong to the author unless explicitly granted. Since he did
NOT explicitly grant them, it's questionable whether the rights existed in
the first place. I suspect a court would take his "clarification" under
consideration - he's explicitly stating that he did NOT mean to grant the
rights.
Now, could someone distribute patches to ipf that you would apply
separately? Yes. Are they going to? Probably not.
>
>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 :-)
>
Sorry, copyright only applies to the expression of an idea, not the idea.
You should have patented the idea ;-)
jeff
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeffry Smith Technical Sales Consultant Mission Critical Linux
[EMAIL PROTECTED] phone:603.930.9739 fax:978.446.9470
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Thought for today: Guido /gwee'do/ or /khwee'do/
Without qualification,
Guido van Rossum (author of Python). Note that Guido answers to
English /gwee'do/ but in Dutch it's /khwee'do/.
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