On 5/6/05, Jeremy Hankins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > "Michael K. Edwards" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > You may not be qualified (as I am not) to offer legal advice. But > > you're certainly qualified to have an opinion. > > Sure. But it's not relevant to this discussion -- despite what many of > the participants seem to believe.
Did you read any of the rest of my message? This particular sentence of mine disagrees with your claim that "almost all of us aren't qualified to have an opinion" on license issues. Then what are we doing messing around with other people's copyrighted material? > > And there isn't > > necessarily an "agreeable, safe position". > > Are you saying there's not? So who's going to sue me (or Debian) for > adopting an overbroad idea of what constitutes a derivative? "Hey, you > decided to abide by my license terms when you didn't have to. I'm gonna > sue!" (Standing? What's that?) It's not particularly agreeable or safe to say, "we, Debian, interpret the GPL to recursively follow the depends/reverse-depends relationships of GPLed packages, crossing most of the individual API and package boundaries within the work called Debian, and therefore the strong set within Debian is being offered to our users under the GPL alone, even if the individual packages contain MIT/BSD/whatever licenses in debian/copyright". That's probably a little stronger than the estoppel one risks in saying the Debian consensus is that dynamically linked Quagga -> NetSNMP -> OpenSSL is illegal (disallowed under the GPL), but not much. My take on it is that such relationships are perfectly legal, but that as a courtesy to the FSF we undertake to resolve such situations when they are discovered, either by efforts to obtain unambiguous license compatibility or by package removal. And if it were me, I'd keep building Quagga against NetSNMP while proceeding with reasonable dispatch, but not in a panic, to request that the Quagga upstream get it together with respect to an OpenSSL exemption. The risk in publicly acknowledging the FSF FAQ as a standard of legitimacy is not that anyone will sue you but that Debian will unwittingly provide a stalking-horse for some GPL copyright holder (not necessarily the FSF) to attack Debian users and derivatives. Say, for instance, I write a program that uses an LGPL library whose upstream doesn't follow a copyright assignment policy, and then someone claims that their GPL code was pasted in a while ago. I watch helplessly while Debian relabels it GPL and purges all GPL-incompatible engineering relationships to that library -- and knowing that they have done so might put me at risk of being estopped along with Debian even if I don't agree with the FSF FAQ myself. That would not be a good situation. (By the way, my undying thanks to the Debian X Strike Force for handling the XFree86 license situation the way they have. No panic, no sudden abandonment of the XFree86 code base, just a decision to decline contributions not available under the MIT/X11 license even if they're from upstream, and to move to an alternate upstream fork after sarge. And a carefully written FAQ, not over-commital on legal issues.) > Conversely, if our idea of what constitutes a derived work is too > narrow we could end up violating someone's copyright. Again, that's not how it works. In the presence of a valid license contract, one is entitled to contract-law standards of the reasonableness of one's attempts to cure a breach when notified. The "automatic termination" clause is probably unenforceable in most jurisdictions; I think (IANAL) few would even read it as authority to terminate on inadvertent (non-material) breach, let alone on the licensor's idea of breach if the licensee's (reasonable) construction makes it not a breach. Consider how it worked in Progress Software v. MySQL. The FSF's affidavit on MySQL's behalf claimed that Progress's license was terminated, but the judge didn't buy it, and upheld Progress's right to go on distributing MySQL's GPL material. The judge called the derivative work issue a "matter of fair dispute" -- and hence not a deliberate breach -- noted that it was arguably cured anyway, that MySQL had not demonstrated irreparable harm, and that the balance of harms favored Progress, and denied the request for preliminary injunction on GPL/copyright grounds. For legal purposes, it often matters not only what you do and don't do but why you say you're (not) doing it. Saying in public that you're trying to do X less often because you believe it's illegal is injudicious at best. Doubly so if you go on to say that you believe that you permanently lost your rights under a license every time you did X. Cheers, - Michael
