Re: A simple mistake (was Re: Should we ship KDE in hamm?)
Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
>On Fri, Jul 24, 1998 at 12:44:55PM +0100, Oliver Elphick wrote:
>>
>> Certainly, but I don't think it affects the issue. What does the licence
>> actually say? A court (at least in the Anglo-Saxon tradition) will
>> assume that things that are not forbidden are allowed.
>
>Oliver, YOU ARE WRONG! (Sorry for shouting).
>
>The Bern convention explicitely says, that if you have not a licence for it,
>it is FORBIDDEN.
>
>This is a matter of fact.
I don't dispute it. The point is that if a licence is self-contradictory
an English court will attempt to interpret what was meant. It will
make as little change as possible to the actual wording in order to
accomplish what it believes to the intention of the licensor. It will
almost certainly not accept that a meaningless licence is meant to be
meaningless. [This is by analogy with practice in Contract cases.]
Perhaps a German court would take a different line.
>Furthermore, from a legal point of view, statically and dynamically linking
>is the same. If the linking is done at build time or at run time doesn't
>matter at all.
You say 'from a legal point of view'; as far as I am aware there is no
legal point of view on this. Until there has been a case where this
is in dispute, there won't be. The actual words of the GPL do not seem to
support your opinion.
--
Oliver Elphick Oliver.Elphick@lfix.co.uk
Isle of Wight http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver
PGP key from public servers; key ID 32B8FAA1
========================================
"Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a
man soweth, that shall he also reap."
Galatians 6:7
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