On Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 04:11:19PM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > >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.
Ah, nice to know. > >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) This is beside the point though, since knowingly distributoing the binary-only firmware under the GPL makes the whole non-distributable, and the above only happened because of sloppiness on the module distributor side who did not care to check the legal facts nicely. That still doesn't make said firmware GPL free. > >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. This is illegal, they used to be shipped on a separate CD back then for this exact reason, but hey, it was over 10 years ago i got involved in this kind of thing. Check with your lawyers and historical personal involved in this. The exact wording is : However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable. So, i guess it is up to interpretation of "accompanies the executable", but having it on the same DVD certainly can be interpreted as "accompanies the executable". Friendly, Sven Luther _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
