Aiming at the GPL?

Aiming at the GPL?

Posted Aug 22, 2003 16:35 UTC (Fri) by ksmathers (subscriber, #2353)
In reply to: Aiming at the GPL? by brouhaha
Parent article: Aiming at the GPL?

[...] However, no one is required to accept the GPL. SCO deliberately chose to accept the GPL and distribute software under those terms. [...] No, the GPL isn't a contract. But it doesn't need to be.

The GPL is a license. Licenses are a subtype of contract. There is no other legal theory for interpreting the GPL than contract law. If the GPL is not a contract then it is legally meaningless.

It can be argued that there was a meeting of minds, or as you put it yourself: I rather doubt that a court will let them get away with saying "Oops, we didn't know what we were doing" [...]. There are legal reasons that have been established typically for centuries, for judging whether there has been a meeting of minds, and accepting consideration is one of those, and GPL can be argued to offer a form of consideration.

But conversely, SCO may have a good argument that they received nothing of considerable value in exchange for their code (due to their unique position as owner of the UNIX assets), and therefor that they must not be held to have effectively released their code under GPL license.

SCO also has a second argument in that they may not have been aware that they were releasing their own code until they found it in the Linux source. If that is the case, then they can also ask that the GPL be invalidated on the basis that there was never an intention to release that code under GPL, but that may be difficult to argue since presumptively they would assume to be aware of the content of products that they release. If SCO does get a court to agree that there was not a contract on this basis, it will probably be because of the precedent set in an 1887 dispute involving an unexpectedly pregnant cow.

A good description of the problems for SCO in the second argument is given in this C-Net article.

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