Alan Mackenzie <[email protected]> writes: > In gnu.misc.discuss Rjack <[email protected]> wrote: >> Over at Groklaw, Pammy Jo has finally come to her senses and admitted >> that an idiot plaintiff like SCO can't attempt to license code under >> the GPL to the general public and then later sue that purported class >> of licensees for copyright infringement. She refers to Eben Moglen's >> comment: > > This has been PJ's position all along - that code licensed under the > GPL is code licensed under the GPL. SCO's argument was that, because > they "weren't fully aware" of what they were doing, they hadn't truly > licensed their code, therefore people using it according to its > licence's terms were thus violating that code's copyright. Or > something like that.
More like "somebody snuck code into their GPL distribution without permission". Say, in a mall somebody peels off a price tag from a cheap article and sticks it to an expensive article. An unrelated customer picks the item up and carries it to the cash register. He pays the lump sum of $10 by credit card for an article worth $5000, the cashier does not notice the discrepancy. His supervisor later recognizes what has happened, the customer has left the shop already. A camera has recorded the act of moving the price tag and the person doing it identified. It is clear that this was the doing of somebody not authorized to do anything in the shop. Can the shop reclaim the article? That's more or less the theory underlying SCO's claims. The problem with that view is that there is abundance evidence that the price tag was "moved" by shop personnel, not just authorized to do this sort of thing in general, but explicitly in the course of a business strategy. SCO is merely in possession of some UNIX rights as the legal successor of Caldera, an explicit Linux company with a Linux strategy. In fact, the company still _is_ Caldera. It merely renamed itself into "SCO Group" for the purpose of making the most of this schizophrenic lawsuit. And it only could do so because it happened to have acquired the rights to the _name_ "SCO" as part of its previous business as Caldera. They are just sheep in a wolf's clothing cheaply acquired, for the sake of shedding crocodile tears before the court. "Oh, my poor little cubs!" -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
