SuSE continued use scenario
Posted Dec 22, 2006 13:56 UTC (Fri) by
Duncan (guest, #6647)
In reply to:
What about Nat Friedman? by Arker
Parent article:
Jeremy Allison Has Resigned from Novell to Protest MS Patent Deal (Groklaw)
The no-distribute point is valid, but khim's original comment points 3 and
4 involved use -- saying with the license gone, one couldn't /use/ the
software in question any more. That part's incorrect, as the GPL and LGPL
are very clear that they are not licenses to /use/, only to distribute
(and modify and distribute derived works). They are quite clear that a
license to /use/ the software is not needed (in contrast with software
that tries to use EULAs).
In khim's original scenario, the point 2, distributing to a friend, would
be illegal, but even that isn't likely to be a problem in practice, at the
person2person distribution level anyway, because the owner of the
copyright or their legal agent (note, not any joe blow) would have to seek
the order to stop distribution and any collect damages, and that's
extremely unlikely to occur at the trivial distribution level of the
example. Companies may have things to worry about, individuals normally
wouldn't.
Even for companies, however, the actual settlement has generally been
simply to either quit distributing and pay damages (generally legal costs
plus an agreed amount to some charity), or to yield the source under the
terms of the GPL (again, plus legal costs and a payment to charity), in
source-restricted cases. Patent-restricted cases would be somewhat
different since yielding the source isn't at issue, but the parallel would
be to either ensure the use under the GPL of the patents in question, or,
if that wasn't possible or agreeable, the same distribution cease and
desist. Thus, the only real damage to the company other than costs and
loss of respect/developers/sales in the FLOSS community, is that they lose
the ability to distribute, which they had already lost with the patent
coverage, it just hadn't been enforced with a court order before.
Of course, the loss of community prestige is counting for more as the
community gets larger, and the financial penalty may be worse in the
patent case since the solution won't be as simple as a source release,
particularly when the patents are owned by someone else and therefore
aren't available to the company to make available for use in the GPL
community. What would actually happen could only be determined as the
case played out, at least until a couple such cases had been dealt with.
Duncan
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