There's a lot of discussion about license terms and rights. There are a couple of things that should be made absolutely clear:
Whoever holds the copyright to a material, they are the owners. They have all rights, including the right to grant other people rights. They can do whatever they want with it. They can keep it private, sell copies of it, or give away copies of it. They can give away free copies, with restrictions on what the recipient is allowed to do with it... That is what you get when you receive software under CDDL or GPL. The copyright holder has granted you the right to possess, copy, distribute, use, and modify the material, as long as you obey the specified conditions. Unfortunately, if you violate those conditions, you have invalidated your rights to possess, copy, distribute, use, or modify the material. You could be prosecuted. Just search for "GPL Lawsuit" and you'll find plenty of documented cases where somebody didn't comply to GPL terms, and then got prosecuted. When the copyright holder grants some rights to you or the world, under some conditions, that does not prevent them from granting other rights to other people under other conditions. If you read CDDL or GPL closely, you'll easily see it's the copyright holder, granting certain rights to the whole world, under certain conditions. Case and point: A company in my past produced a proprietary commercial software product. We wanted to use a valuable library which was published under GPL, but we couldn't, because then our proprietary product would become a "derivative work" and we'd be forced to release it under GPL or compatible terms. The company enlisted lawyers, and negotiated with the copyright holder of the GPL library, and paid them, to release the software privately, under commercial terms instead of GPL. So the static linking was permitted, and the proprietary software was not required to be released under GPL or any other license. It remained proprietary. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
