How will the court decide?
Posted May 16, 2003 21:15 UTC (Fri) by
tjc (guest, #137)
In reply to:
How will the court decide? by dd9jn
Parent article:
...and if SCO is right...?
The law does not take semantics into account but only the actual text.
That sort of takes the teeth out of the license, don't you think? If someone can come along and just reformat the code, change variable names, and restructure things a bit, then there isn't much practical difference between the GPL and the X11 license.
As an example, suppose I start with a window manager that's licensed under the GPL and rewrite every line of code as described above and release it under an X11 license: have I violated the GPL? I used GPLed code during the development phase of my project, but at the end, none of it remains.
Now supposed someone did this with SCO code in the Linux kernel. It can't be proven that this was done unless a chunk of code was copied in unchanged. But SCO seems to be saying that code has been copied into the Linux kernel and "obfuscated", and they expect a court to make some determination as to whether this was done or not. If a programmer can't tell for certain, what's the judge going to do?
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