"Rjack" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
FACT: No claim for any relief requested by an S.F.L.C. plaintiff
has ever been granted by a federal court.
The spin here is that it has never been necessary to go to judgment due to
the defendant always yielding to the impeccable logic of the SFLC. Multiple
instances of this have been cited ad nauseam here and in Groklaw and many
other places.
What is always ignored, however, is that the real issue of interest is
never in play. The GPL essentially allows anyone to do anything with
everything GPL with the sole provision that the doer pass onto any
downstream user the source materials involved, including the license text
itself. Anyone making direct use of the GPL program is even indemnified by
the GPL to automatically receive permission even if the materials are not
supplied by the upstream distributor. No money is required to change hands
unless the distributor wants to charge for "support" or for the cost of
generating the copies of the material involved.
That is a wonderfully benevolent position until someone makes a contribution
that is actually worth some money to downstream users. ( I am not familiar
with any case where that has actually occurred and perhaps some FOSS
advocate could point to one.) Regardless, it has never been an issue in any
of the SFLC actions which have centered around an author using the BusyBox
utilities for a Linux compatible program without publishing the source
materials for the BusyBox version used. The "settlement" has universally
been for the defendant to simply publish or otherwise provide access to the
material on a web link somewhere. In the Verizon case, that was performed
by the Verizon supplier rather than Verizon itself, which was promptly
deemed an adequate move and the plaintiff moved for dismissal.
Such a low cost or no cost solution to the case has to always be preferable
to even a slight bit of litigation expense and so the SFLC is destined to
always "win" such victories. I have never heard of a case where the
defendant was trying to protect the disclosure of some improvement to the
original GPL program that had commercial value. Until that happens, the
whole issue remains a silly academic tempest in a teapot.
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