Examining an attack on the GPL

Examining an attack on the GPL

Posted Nov 24, 2003 21:44 UTC (Mon) by fergal (subscriber, #602)
Parent article: Examining an attack on the GPL

I don't think the license vs contract argument is needed to dispute this and I think even if contracts were involved it's still nonesense.

The imaginary buyer never received any code from the imaginary seller under a GPL license and so they couldn't possibly have any GPL rights. The fact that one possible way to distribute the code legitimately is to provide such a license is irrelevant. Figuring out which way to distribute the code is a matter between the original author and the seller and is none of the buyer's business. Yes it may impact the buyer in the future at which point they may be able to sue the seller for something but depending on how the dispute is resolved, it may never impact them at all.

If this doesn't make sense yet, consider the following: Nastysoft takes GPL code written by uberhacker RNB, includes it in their software and sells it to the general public with a clickwrap license. RNB finds out what happened and fights it out with Nastysoft who finally agree to buy a license from RNB for his code for a hefty fee. They continue to seel it to the general public as before. That's it, the general public don't get to say "hey when we bought your software you didn't have that agreement with RNB so give us your source code". They never had a right to the source code because they never received the product with a GPL license.

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