Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 09:20:50 -0700 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: jgrosch@MooseRiver.com, "John S. Dyson" <dyson@iquest.net> Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, jkh@zippy.cdrom.com, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: O'Reilly article: Whence the Source: Untangling the Open Source/Free Software Debate Message-ID: <4.1.19990313091044.04021790@localhost> In-Reply-To: <19990313080537.B44604@ontario.mooseriver.com> References: <199903130912.EAA01252@y.dyson.net> <4.1.19990312162726.03ff1c40@localhost> <199903130912.EAA01252@y.dyson.net>
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At 08:05 AM 3/13/99 -0800, Josef Grosch wrote: >I am frequently amazed that people thrash back and forth over GPL vs. BSD >licensing without having a clear understanding of what these licenses really >mean. John Dyson and Brett Glass are both intelligent and clever people but >that are not lawyers and specifically not intellectual property lawyers. One >thing that we need to keep in mind is the law has its' own logic which >often has no relationship with day to day reality. True. Not long ago, I consulted a few intellectual property lawyers to get their opinions of what's going on. The consensus opinion was that while the BSD license is simple and quite clear, the enforceability of the GPL is in question because it is so unconventional and there is no case law. One of them suggested that "copyleft," because it's designed to subvert the intent of copyright law as defined in the Constitution, may not be legally valid at all. >Another point to keep in mind is that the entire GPL and BSD license issues >can be rendered moot by a large corporation willing to spend the money on >lawyers. If, to randomly pull a large corporate name out of the air, >General Electric was using GPL tools to manufacture product and was not >living up to the specifics of GPL, according to Stallman, by not shipping >source code with the product, there is little Stallman, the FSF, and Linux >fanatics, etc. could do about it. GE could just bury Stallman and the FSF >in legal expenses. GE probably has legal department of over 1000 people >including several hundred lawyers and para-legals. Not only that, but the GPL is easily subverted via "clean room" reverse engineering. This technique has stood up even to IBM's vast resources (that's why we have IBM PC clones). All of the lawyers I consulted agreed that this is a vaid way to "liberate" code from the GPL. >Getting back to Johns point. A research paper is a very good idea but in >writing this paper the author needs to consultant with competent legal >authority for a clear understanding of subtleties and nuances of these 2 >licenses. This kind of advice will not come cheap. A cousin of mine is an >intellectual property lawyers in San Francisco. He gets $250.00 per hour >and his billing rate in the middle of the scale. Not every point requires consultation with a lawyer. And one great way to have a paper reviewed is to submit it to a law school CLASS for a critique. They'll gladly pick it to bits, advancing all sorts of conventional and unconventional legal theories. --Brett To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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