Stefaan A Eeckels wrote: > > On Mon, 03 Jul 2006 12:13:02 +0200 > Alexander Terekhov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Now please piss of with your "honesty". > > Why am I not surprised?
Eeckels, Eeckels. The contract laws recognize a concept called "efficient breach" which encourages breach of a contract if it's economically efficient to do so. Compliance with a contract is almost always voluntary -- if you choose not to comply, then you don't have to. You merely have to compensate the non-breaching party for his expectancy interest. And regarding the GPL, there's no basis for any "trust" at all given that under many state laws it can be terminated at will by GPL authors even before statutory renewal after 35 years. See http://lw.bna.com/lw/19990406/981659.htm BTW, in this respect, I also like this: http://www.advogato.org/article/606.html ------ Posted 10 Jan 2003 by ncm (Master) A quick scan through the Free Software licenses I have immediately on hand showed one thing in common: none say the rights are waived perpetually or irrevocably. On the face of it, it seems, I could release a program under the GPL, and then announce five years later that it and all derived works are under my private control again. I wrote to Eben Moglen (FSF counsel) asking about this, but he didn't reply. ------ BWAHAHAHAHAHA ------ I wrote to Fred von Lohmann of the EFF, and he said that the question is a difficult one, and that it "actually came up in the cphack case, but the issue was never resolved". ------ BWAHAHAHAHAHA ------ (For commercial software this isn't such an issue, because the UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) and the first-sale doctrine imply whatever waivers you need to get full use of what you paid for.) The best thing to do, it seems to me, is to add language in each copyright waiver itself, asserting that the author waives those rights in perpetuity, subject to yada yada. This will be a big job. The Debian archive lists over 8000 packages, each with a license, and an author to explain all this to. For works with many authors (like X, Linux, or Apache) it might even be impossible. ------ BWAHAHAHAHAHA regards, alexander. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
