Alan DuBoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> You seem pretty confident in your interpetation of the law, and maybe you
> are spot on, I don't know. My interaction with the legal department has to
> do with CDDL/GPL/BSD interaction.
I had several courses payed by my employer because I need to do some legal
stuff in my job... I try to understand how lawyers think. This is needed in
order to estimate whether there is a need for a legal case and whether such
a case might be won.
In my private life, I did also try to sue two companies for GPL violatoions
long before Harald Welte did similar things. I had many discussions with my
lawyer at this time trying to find out what is possible and what should/could
be done.
It turned out that it is usually not possible (note that Harald Welte's cases
are hand picked from the general pool of GPL violatoions while I did try to
defend "cdrtools") to win a GPL related case. There have been sereval
discussions in public mailing lists related to my cases and after some time,
Eben Moglen did chime in. He claimed that it is possible to defend the GPL. So
I did send him a private mail with the arguments of my lawyer. After reding
these arguments, Moglen admitted that I was right but he needs to repeat in
the public what's theoretically possible. Be careful when reading Moglens
public statements as he has an own opinion but usually publishes the opinion
of Richard Stallman which may be completely different.
With these background experiences, I learned to verify claims from other people
by comparing them to the official law or license text.
It is obvious that even a lawyer cannot tell you anything final on a legal
problem before it has been tried for. But it is possible to judge on the
credibility of a claim by comparing it with the original license text.
You do not need to be a lawyer in case you just take all public proven claims
and compare them with the license text. Trow way all unproven claims before and
then compare the remaining proven claims with their credibility.
>From this perspective, it turns out that there is no problem to include CDDLd
code in a GPLd project as long as the CDDLd code does not become a derived work
from the act of combining.
Jörg
--
EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (uni)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
_______________________________________________
opensolaris-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
