On Thu, Dec 14, 2006 at 12:17:49PM -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 14, 2006 at 04:33:47PM +0000, Alan wrote:
> > > The trick is to let a lawyer send cease and desist letters to people
> > > distributing the infringing software for 1 Euro at Ebay.
> >
> > Doesn't that sound even more like the music industry ? Pick on Grandma,
> > and people who've no clue about the issue. It's not the way to solve such
> > problems. The world does not need "The war on binary modules". Educate
> > people instead, and talk to vendors.
>
> .... or like Microsoft, who is threatening to make war on end-users
> instead of settling things with vendors. (One of the reasons why I
> personally find the Microsoft promise not to sue _Novell_'s end users
> so nasty. Microsoft shouldn't be threatening anyone's users; if they
> have a problem, they should be taking it up with the relevant vendor,
> not sueing innocent and relatively shallow-pocketed end-users and
> distributors.)
>
> One of the things that I find so interesting about how rabid people
> get about enforcing GPL-only modules is how they start acting more and
> more like the RIAA, MPAA, and Microsoft every day....
Please don't think or imply I'd plan to do this, I'm only saying that
there's a risk for users in such grey areas.
It could be that someone who wants to harm Linux starts suing people
distributing Linux. If your goal is to harm Linux, suing users can
simply be much more effective than suing vendors...
It could even be that people distributing Linux could receive cease and
desist letters from people without any real interest in the issue
itself - "cease and desist letter"s are so frequent in Germany because
the people who have to sign them have to pay the lawyers' costs that are
usually > 1000 Euro, and that's a good business for the lawyers.
> - Ted
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
