Where's the violation?
Where's the violation?
Posted Jun 24, 2023 18:04 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)In reply to: Where's the violation? by geofft
Parent article: Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model
> I don't think this is quite true (see e.g. this legal case that Conservancy was in and this older discussion covered on LWN), but assuming it is, it doesn't make a difference. Does replacing the word "contract" with "license" change the validity of the rest of what I wrote?
A distinction without a difference, as I put it.
A contract is made when one party makes an "offer to treat", a second party accepts the offer, and the first party replies "done".
The only difference between your "normal" contract, and a licence like the GPL, is that the "offer to treat" and the "done" are one and the same.
That's why you get contract negotiations but not (normally) licence negotiations. I've given the example of shops mis-pricing items where they *can* say "sorry, mistake, NOT done". And quite often a contract offer is met with a counter-offer, but the reality licences and contracts are, to all intents and purposes, interchangeable.
Oh - and that's another reason why all this fuss about Red Hat is garbage. Contracts cannot place obligations on unrelated parties. So the GPL (a contract between the distributor and the copyright holder) cannot place obligations on a third party providing support services (and vice versa). The other thing to bear in mind is the law believes in "hats". Never mind that the same physical person can be all three of the copyright holder, the distributor, and the support service - as far as the law is concerned they are three different entities because they have three different "hats".
Cheers,
Wol
