[trimming Cc list]
It wouldn't be worth my time and I have trouble understanding how
I could demonstrate personal loss making the law suit worth persuing in
the first place.
Perhaps because you know the code better than anyone else, so you
could provide paid support on that derivative as well.
This is true whether the code is GPL or truly free.
First of all, let's avoid equivocal language (and politics). you'll
probably agree that the meaning of "truly free" is in the eye of the
beholder. So, let's simplify things and say BSD.
The difference is that if that for BSD code the other person has the
right to close up the derivative, and you know that in this case you
won't be able to provide any kind of paid support. (There's also the
case of someone copylefting the derivative; how to approach this case is
a wholly different topic).
In the case of the GPL, the other person is violating your copyright.
You may decide to let it go, but if your or your company's finances
depend on providing paid support for that project, or on dual licensing
it as GPL/commercial, he's hurting you.
Or maybe because you have to. There was a case of a free software
project (JMRI) being sued for patent infringement by a proprietary
software company. It turned out that the proprietary software included
source code from the free software project without attribution
(copyleft was not even necessary, as the project was under the
Artistic License!). In this case, the possibility to counter-sue saved
the free software programmer from having to pay millions of dollars.
I think this might be an over simplification. There were many statements
in this history (new to me - just read it all - good read) that
demonstrate that the patents were incorrectly granted. The copyright
issue was involved, and the defense of free / open source copyrights was
involved, but it looks pretty clear to me that JMRI wanted to shut down
*all* violations. They wanted the incorrectly granted patents dropped,
and they wanted their copyrights held intact. Was the latter required
for the former victory, or was that just how things played out?
From my understanding, it was the easiest way to get the case settled.
I'll also note that even if it was required, it was the Artistic
License, and it was demonstrated as being valid in a court of law.
Yes, I mentioned it above. My points were basically two:
1) patents are a big threat to free/open source software, so it's better
to keep our main counter-weapon (copyright) strong.
2) you might be forced to sue even for violation of a permissive
license, so watering down the ability to defend your rights may turn out
to be a bad idea, even if you choose to skip copyleft.
I hope nothing of this happens to anyone involved in this thread, of course!
Paolo
