On Oct 3, 2012, at 12:14 PM, William H. Magill wrote: > > On Oct 3, 2012, at 1:26 PM, Chris Murphy <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Oct 3, 2012, at 12:45 AM, Thomas von Hassel wrote: >>> On Oct 2, 2012, at 7:13 PM, Chris Murphy <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> How does it stop Apple? >> >>> There is in fact an explaination directly on bombich.com >> >> It does not at all explain how GPLv3 stops Apple from including newer >> versions of the same apps they already ship on Mac OS X. Apple already must >> make source code and modifications available for GPLv2 software. It doesn't >> require them at all to consider all of Mac OS X as licensed under the GPLv3. > > Intellectual Property Law is broken. Period.
Let's not expand the conversation by 50 orders of magnitude. It broke when software patents were allowed. It has very little to do with licensing, which the vast majority of time solves the patent dispute problem. > Any "license" decision is a NEGOTIATION between two (or more) parties. > A "take it or leave it" License is no license at all. Such a license is only > resolved when and if one or the other of the parties "go to court," and > assert the terms of that license have been violated. What you're trying to say here is obscure. All EULAs are take it or leave it. > >> It doesn't require them at all to consider all of Mac OS X as licensed under >> the GPLv3. > > This is your interpretation, not that of Apple's Lawyers, nor of the court. You're welcome to provide a citation that Apple's lawyers and "the court" have offered an opinion on this. The GPL is quite clear that it only applies to GPL modified code that remains in a binary independent state, which of course rsync is exceptionally independent. It's totally stand alone and the OS doesn't even use it for anything. It clearly does not attach the GPL to the whole of Mac OS X. If Apple incorporated the Finder into rsync, or rsync into the Finder, by the fact the Finder is an integral part of Mac OS X, they probably would attach the GPL to the whole of Mac OS X. But that is not the case. And this hasn't changed in GPLv2 vs v3. And further in all litigation to date regarding the GPL this particular area of what becomes attached to the GPL is not a gray area. Everyone knows this. > Clearly there is "something different" about Version 3 of the GPL, otherwise > we would still be at Version 2 or even Version 1. There is. You can't take away the public (user) right to modify GPL licensed software, through a hardware lock that prevents modified software from running. If you incorporate your patented code into GPL code, you extend a license to that patented code - the GPLv2 did this with copyrighted code, not patented code. This is part of the internationalization aspect of GPLv3 since it's a mostly American invention to grant patents to software where previously copyrights were sufficient. And it also makes NDA's and various other more strict licensing attempts on GPL'd software void. The idea is that everyone benefits equally. If you want an unequal license, don't use the GPL (v3 in particular). That part of the GPL is also what's caused Apple to reject GPLv2 apps from the App Store, which is that the GPL disallows stricter usage terms than the GPL on GPL'd software. Yet Apple's EULA for App Store apps is more usage restrictive than the GPL, so the GPL considers Apple's license incompatible. > Similarly, we have no idea what "arguments" have been presented by all of the > various patent law-suits against Apple. None of them are ever made public. > However, it does not take much "pseudo legal thinking" to come up with ways > in which any "patent troll" could head to court... even if the only > justification is that they "be paid to go away." I don't know how that relates to the GPL at all. Chris Murphy _______________________________________________ MacOSX-admin mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-admin
