>But remember the thing is off to a judge to decide, and the decision will in >the end care more about the intentions and not about petty wording we use >here.
Not in all jurisdictions; in many jurisdictions the judge will pick the interpretation most favoured by the party which did NOT draw up the contract. If I'm not mitaken, if you have a contract under Dutch law and it has a ambiguity with a reasonable second interpretation, the judge will interpret it in favour of the other party, in this case the licensee and not the author of the software. And that is as it should be: ambiguous contracts written with malicious intent are pointless under such a system. >For your info, some disagree with the proprietary module loading, and the >linux kernel hackers are hardly exemplar in this since they allow without >problem companies to distribute code including binary-only firmware for add-on >cards, _AND_ claim implicitly that said firmware is under the GPL. We, the >debian kernel team, pointed that out, and where shuned by the Linux Kernel >people, but got positive response to fix this from companies like broadcom and >others, who fixed the licencing of their drivers recently. Note that in some cases such firmware is bound by other legal restrictions; e.g., for modems and wireless cards, the firmware implements part of the specification which has gotten FCC or similar approval. Distributing the source code for such firmware is often prohibited by law. (Well, certainly changing it and using changed firmware is prohibited by law) >Provide you don't ship them as part of your OS. This was already the case with >gcc on Solaris. Define "ship as part of the OS"; gcc and other GPL'ed stuff ships on the same DVD as Solaris. Casper _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
