"Rahul Dhesi" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
"amicus_curious" <[email protected]> writes:
The CAFC has ruled that these requirements are not meaningless.
--
They suggested that the requirements were not meaningless to the
copyright holders who get a thrill out of seeing their name in print,
but that is meaningless to me. I think that it speaks ill of those
egomaniacs who want to create such a ruckus just so that the world
might see how smart they are. Pathetic.
Perhaps you haven't read what the CAFC wrote. Here is a fragment.
Through this controlled spread of information, the copyright holder
gains creative collaborators to the open source project; by requiring
that changes made by downstream users be visible to the copyright
holder and others, the copyright holder learns about the uses for his
software and gains others' knowledge that can be used to advance
future software releases.
Please read the whole thing -- it's online at
I have read through it previously and I don't have any problem with the
notion as a concept. However, in the case of BusyBox, such hypothetical
benefits did not accrue to the copyright holders. There was no modification
that changed the library for the authors' benefit or any user. In the JMRI
case, the district judge found the same thing to be true.
I don't know how the CAFC managed to come to the conclusion that publishing
the acknowledgement on an obscure website did anything to inform the
original author as to uses for the software either. There is no requirement
in the GPL that the authors be so informed anyway. Apparently the usage is
fairly obvious siince the SFLC managed to find out that Actiontec was using
BusyBox.
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