On Jun 22, 2007, "Tomas Neme" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The thing is, what matters in copyright and licencing matters is what > the author of the code understands, no the licence's author, if > ambiguous. And the kernel's rights holder is Linus.
Since he didn't get copyright assignments, each contributor is the copyright holder of her/his own contribution. And this means each holder gets a say on how s/he understood GPLv2. IANAL, but I think if Linus' intended interpretation had been clarified all the way from the beginning, he could have grounds to claim that everyone else had implicitly accepted that reading by contributing to the project. But since it was a decision made many years later, his clarification on his reading of the license is in a way an additional permission that affects only his own contributions; other authors are still entitled to try to enforce their understanding of the legal terms of the license, and they would have the spirit of the GPL and its preamble on their side to guide the interpretation. Even if contract law states something like, in adhesion contracts, the party who writes the contract gives the other party the benefits of any ambiguity in the writing, the GPL is not a contract, it's a license, and per copyright law, licenses are to be interpreted restrictively. > Linus has the last word on it. In the sense that he can decide to remove all contributions from dissenting authors, yes, he does. But he can't impose his more lax interpretation upon other authors. Under copyright, it's the more restrictive reading that prevails, in that any holder who understands his rights are being trampled can enforce them. And since at least one such author is vocal in his dissent, not even estoppel defenses would apply. But IANAL. -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ FSF Latin America Board Member http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED], gcc.gnu.org} Free Software Evangelist [EMAIL PROTECTED], gnu.org} - 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/
