Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 29 Jun 1999 14:13:40 +0200 | From | Bernd Paysan <> | Subject | Re: iToaster in violation of GPL? |
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Mike A. Harris wrote: > Didn't the BEOS people steal device driver code > from Linux in the past? And afterwards drop the drivers when > threatened with possible legal action?
Did they?
I think one must test GPL in court finally. Even these BeOS actions (taking a driver and dropping it after threatened) is *not* ok. You can't get out of a copyright violation lawsuit by not violating it in the future - you already have violated it, and that's it. With a piece of GPL code it means: publish all your code of the derivate under GPL. Copyright is something you must actively protect - if you let things go loose, a court might decide that you didn't mean the license as written. If we are not willing to protect our IP, we don't own it. That's the law. And for damage: yes, we are damaged. After all, the GPL (and FSF's copyright transfer policy, too) allows the original copyright holder (as a whole) to sell proprietary derivatives of their own work. The damage is what the violating company got for their proprietary derivative - that's the potential price the copyright holders could have made from their work.
If companies like Novell or BeOS or the iToaster here violate the GPL and then - after being informed they did so - just claim that there really wasn't GPL'd code in their product ("we cleanroomed everything"), it's really time to sue. How can we know without having seen the code (embedded e-mail addresses in the binary left aside)?
-- Bernd Paysan
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