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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Major licensing issue alarm...
From:       dep <dep () snet ! net>
Date:       2000-07-05 19:41:51
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On Wed, 05 Jul 2000, Bill Soudan wrote:

| 'Elsewhere, Alan also remarked, "Actually folks get sued for not
| following copyrights. I've been talking to someone recently who
| plans to solve the KDE gpl/nongpl issue by issuing cease and desist
| orders to KDE. Vendors also take it seriously. Some of them
| anyway"'

ac is very impressive to kernel.org, but as a lawyer he makes a very 
good coder. 1.) people don't just up and issue cease and desist 
orders anymore than they issue search warrants. they need a judge to 
do that. and under existing law, there is no judge in the whole wide 
world who would issue such an order. in short, his legal opinions are 
apparently emitted by a different, lower, orifice than is his code.

interestingly, the widely held view in the u.s. legal community is 
that any court of competent jurisdiction (and the gpl being a 
document issued here and claiming protection based on u.s. law, that 
means here) would find pre-emptively that glp=public domain, its 
protestations to the contrary, and that one cannot put conditions on 
public domain, and that's that. there is some possibility of a test 
case before long, and it is likely to be bloody:

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/2000/1/

| By none other than Alan Cox.  Now I've heard he's been somewhat
| biased against KDE from the beginning, but this should raise some
| concern all around...

no, it shouldn't, because he doesn't know what he's talking about.

-- 
dep
--
Truth is so obscure in these times and falsehood so established, 
that unless we love the truth, we cannot know it. - Blaise Pascal
 
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