Re: GPL and linking (was: Urgently need GPL compatible libsnmp5-dev replacement :-()
Speaking of people who will be pretty pissed when it turns out that
Eben Moglen has been bullshitting about the legal meaning of the GPL
all along:
http://trends.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/02/11/2216239&tid=147
But for better or for worse, Mr. Wallace doesn't seem to have a
terribly firm grasp of the applicable law, either. Not unless he's
got quite a bit more evidence of restraint of trade up his sleeve.
I think it very likely (IANAL) that he could obtain declarative relief
for the asking with respect to the FSF's assertions regarding linking,
etc. But it's not that easy to get a judgment under the Clayton Act
(actually, Robinson-Patman Act, if he is claiming injury to an
individual competitor; see Chroma v. GTE Products).
I think he's going to have to show either that the FSF offers, in some
sense, lower prices to other people that it does to him, or that it
engages in predatory pricing. The former is going to be pretty hard
to prove -- especially once the linking claim is demolished, and he
can hook his pretty GUI into GDB if he wants, like Wind River does --
and the latter is going to take more research into facts about pricing
and linked products than he's likely to do (see, for instance,
Kentmaster Manufacturing v. Jarvis). Of course, I could be biased;
I'm pro-non-crack-smoking-GPL and I think a business model based on
maintenance and upgrade service is saner that software licensing to
begin with, with few exceptions (such as the DXO Capture example I
ranted about a few months ago).
So Mr. Wallace can probably drag the FSF through the mud, shine some
light on their business practices with respect to selective
enforcement of the GPL (do you think they harass Wind River about the
boundaries of a derivative work?), and generally destroy Eben Moglen's
credibility (I am guessing, IANAL, we'll see). But I think it
improbable that he will get a dime out of it.
Of course, it's possible that the court will examine the GPL and agree
with Mr. Wallace that there is no way to construe it that licenses
distribution of all those derivative works (yes, he appears also to
have spotted the "agency to sublicense" problem). If so, I have no
idea what is going to happen to GPL projects without copyright
assignment policies. Not that they suddenly become "undistributable";
just that people will wake up to the risk of getting SCOed by somebody
who actually does have copyright on a non-trivial bit of the Linux
kernel or something. If GPL section 6 is struck and thus the GPL
can't actually be relied upon as an affirmative defense against
infringement when distributing a derivative work, we're all stuck with
some feeble estoppel / reliance based argument. Blecch.
Cheers,
- Michael
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