In article <[email protected]>, Hyman Rosen <[email protected]> wrote:
> Rjack wrote: > > Anyone who conveys copies of covered works is not bound by > > the GPL's voidable terms and has a perfect defense of estoppel. > > You're welcome to try this. How about making a version of GCC with > a proprietary addition? Be sure to let us know how it turns out. I don't see any fundamental logical flaw in the argument that allows this. Let's say I want to create a commercial product based on GCC, and not distribute source. I form two corporations. Corporation A takes the GCC source, modifies it, and builds binaries. It then produces a million CDs containing these binaries, drops them in a box with a single CD containing source code, and delivers them to Company B. Company B throws the CD containing the source in the trash, and sells the million discs containing the binaries. Company A hasn't violated the GPL because it made source available to all of the entities it distributed binaries to (namely, Company B). Company B hasn't violated the GPL because it never accepted the GPL; its resale of those discs was allowed under the first sale doctrine. This clearly violates the spirit of the GPL. But ruling against it would, as far as I can see, require a judge to abandon one of the following: a) the first sale doctrine, b) the principle that corporations are legally separate entities, or c) the principle that contracts can't bind third-parties. -- "What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works [...]" -- Barack Obama, January 20th, 2008 _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
