On Thu, Mar 16, 2006 at 03:51:28PM -0800, Thomas Lord wrote: > So what do you think? The GPL allows this, right?
I believe so, yes. I believe you could raise a valid question in court about whether or not you lose your right to create modified versions of the works in question by issuing this contract; the answer to that one is not obvious to me. Support contracts are predisposed to limit what you can do with the thing being supported, because the supporting organisation has limited capabilities. This one is not particularly unusual. The client retains the option of cancelling the contract and resuming their full privileges under the GPL. The GPL is designed for the goal of ensuring that the body public can do whatever they want with the work, under the 'information wants to be free' assumption that says: if there are no stigmata attached to the public for having a copy, then they will obtain one despite the best efforts of the people trying to keep it secret. 'Two men can keep a secret when one of them is dead'. It does not attempt to prevent individuals from entering into contracts which later restrict their exercise of the privileges granted by the GPL. I think that's a deliberate feature. It wouldn't be a free license if it tried to make such restrictions. It is presumed that the free market will dispose of excessively onerous contracts, because no single vendor accrues advantage from having a monopoly on the ability to provide support services. Essentially, if redhat's support contract is too restrictive, everybody will just buy novell's support contract instead. The market will select the optimal tradeoff points between contract restrictions, support effectiveness (which *is* improved by this contract), and cost. In essence, this is not relevant to the purpose of the GPL. You can't solve everything with a software license. _______________________________________________ Gnu-arch-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-arch-users GNU arch home page: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnu-arch/
