Erast Benson wrote:
But are you seriosly saying that SUN violates GPL?
I believe you've misunderstood Thomas.What Thomas is trying to get across, I think, is that whatever Sun does or does not do has little to no significance for your own case. In particular, "but Sun does it too" does not constitute a line of defense that would hold up in court, since it's up to the copyright holders to enforce their copyrights against violators, if and when they wish to do so.
Please prove it. (better in court).
Unless he is the copyright holder of a piece of code whose license is being violated, there is nothing he can prove in court. A third party whose copyrights are not being violated can't really do much. Save from alerting the copyright holders, which afaict from his mails Thomas already did.
FWIW, GPL has been used to obtain injunctions against GPL violators in Germany, for example.
And once you will prove it, I will belive you. Until that time, all this looks like another Debian's flame to me. or better... religious war. In which I'm not going to participate anymore.
I believe you have a fundamental problem on your hands here: you are advertising your OpenSolaris based distribution as a Debian-based GNU-Solaris.
I think your major problem is that your OpenSolaris distribution's distinctive feature is core integration of GPLd package management software written by Debian developers. Debian developers and debian-legal regulars have been pointedly questioning your understanding of the GPL, without getting adequate replies, afaict.
If your core feature is GPLd code coming from Debian, I'd kindly suggest to take the concerns of Debian developers regarding compliance with the license of that code seriously, and to argue your points accordingly.
cheers, dalibor topic