Monsoon Multimedia GPL lawsuit settled [LWN.net]

Monsoon Multimedia GPL lawsuit settled

Posted Oct 30, 2007 21:33 UTC (Tue) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943)
In reply to: Monsoon Multimedia GPL lawsuit settled by MattPerry
Parent article: Monsoon Multimedia GPL lawsuit settled

MattPerry wrote:

The KDE authors were the copyright holders and were free to do as they wished with their code. There wasn't any FSF-copyrighted code that was linked with KDE.

One refuting counter-example, off the top of my head: kfloppy, part of kdeutils. Upstream copyright owner is, as you can verify, FSF.

I've not bothered to study that case in years, and never tried to collect more of the above sort of particulars. (Very likely, there were lots more-significant codebases than "kfloppy".) However, at the time, I was going around saying the same sorts of things you were, except in the form of questions out of wariness: "Whose copyright is being infringed, given that the KDE coders wrote all the code? And what business does FSF have opining on the matter or forgiving infringement?" Turned out, my assumptions (and yours) were mistaken, and a friend was kind enough to cite kfloppy to me as an illustrative example.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

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Also ...

Posted Oct 31, 2007 6:11 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

... in his "forgiveness" message, RMS urged any other copyright holders that were infringed by KDE to forgive any violations as well. It's true that the KDE authors wrote almost all the code themselves, but as Rick points out, not all of it. So thanks to Trolltech fixing the QT license as well as these acts of forgiveness, KDE became legally clean. Too bad that some bitterness remained, even to this day.

Monsoon Multimedia GPL lawsuit settled

Posted Oct 31, 2007 8:29 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

You're wrong, according to the research KDE did at the time. To quote
http://www.kde.org/announcements/rmsresponse.php: "There are only two parts of KDE that have
GPLed code not written explicitely for KDE -- a small bit in kmidi and a few lines in
kghostview."

Monsoon Multimedia GPL lawsuit settled

Posted Oct 31, 2007 22:50 UTC (Wed) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link]

"boudewijn" wrote:

You're wrong, according to the research KDE did at the time.

Sadly, this merely proves conclusively that the "research KDE did at the time" was, itself, incorrect. You can verify the example I gave, for yourself, by downloading a kdeutils source tarball and observing the presence of FSF's copyright notice, plain as day, in the kfloppy subdirectory.

It's a bit late in the day to track down what else they missed in composing their "KDE 'Official' Response to Stallman Editorial", but I do wonder about the extent of their undercounting. (I see third-party claims of the day about vt, kghostview/kgv, kdvi, kmidi, kscd, and others, but a single verified example suffices to make the point.)

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com