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Disputed? (Score:1)
The GPL has held up in every single court case against violators in the US and Germany. (I don’t know what the situation is like in other countries. It may differ there.)
(In most every case, the defendant demurs and settles before the case is actually tried before court. That’s probably not because they’re afraid that the GPL may be deemed invalid.)
Reply to This
Re: (Score:2)
By disputed I didn't mean "legally" disputed, and being a non-native English speaker I may have misunderstood it. By disputed I meant that it is:
A certain Israeli BSD developer noted that sites like gpl-violations.org are "the anti-thesis of
Re: (Score:1)
Right, then “disputed” was the wrong word. “Controversial” would have been a much better choice.
See, that’s an excellent demonstration of your point that nobody really understands licences. (By the same token I cannot in good consciousness claim that I understand them; the most I can say is that I have identi
Re: (Score:2)
Right, then “disputed” was the wrong word. “Controversial” would have been a much better choice.
Fair enough. "Controversial" it is. I'm pretty sure I heard "disputed" used for non-legal things, but in this context it might be misleading.
See, that’s an excellent demonstration of your point that nobody really understands licences. (By the same token I cannot in good consciousness claim that I understand them; the most I can say is that I have identified more errors in my reasoning than many non-lawyer type people.)
Well, I read the MIT Licence and understood everything there. Then I realised sub-license means something a bit different than what I thought. I also read the SleepyCat (now part of Oracle) BerkeleyDB licence and it was pretty obvious and easy to understand. It is a GPL-like licence, but from what I understood somewhat more liberal in allowing even non-GPL-compatible, and proprietary source to link against it.
I read the GPLv2 one day and didn't understand most of it. My (superficial I am sure) understanding of the GPLv2 is by reading what educated people said about it and judging for myself what sounds more logical.
Again, like I wanted to say, some licences can be interpreted in several different ways by the Law. But one doesn't have to be a lawyer specialising in copyright law to be able to have a more superficial understanding of what a licence entails. It helps though.
The core thing to understand with licences is that the licence never affects the copyright holder. The copyright holder themself can do whatever they damn well please. What the licence regulates is who has what rights when the work has been distributed by one third party to another.
In this exchange, the GPL favours the recipient. The MITL favours the distributor.
Not sure I agree with it. Sometimes people can play different roles.
That’s it. Neither licence is more or less free; both give one party power over the other, they just differ in which party gets the preferential treatment.
Also, to come back to this point:
This combines at least two fallacious ideas. One of them is that all the skill necessary to drive a software project to success is programming aptitude. (Not true; thus, the fact that some project devotes effort to track down GPL violators does not at all imply diminished effort in programming.) Another is that time is fungible, ie. time you spend watching TV, say, is interchangeable with time you spend programming.