Re: Why

[cjw44@cam.ac.uk (Colin Watson)]

ruptured-duck@home.com (Bob Bernstein) wrote:
>"Paul McHale" <pmchale@doubleesolutions.com> wrote:
>> > Well, you posted this Friday afternoon and got thirteen replies (including
>> > braindead recommendations such as "get Corel"), none of which you
>> 
>> Braindead ?  It is based on debian ...  Do you really think Corel is a bad
>> distro ?  I haven't used it enough.
>
>The new Evil Empire is not RedHat. That's a mistake many of us have made.
>Debian will rue the day it got in bed with Corel. I predict Obergruppenfuhrer
>Cowpland will mount a full court legal press - and soon - to break the GPL.

[Disclaimer: IANAL.]

This is certainly the nightmare scenario for free software - but how?

It seems to me that there are two plausible routes to breaking the GPL.
The first is to demonstrate that the licence is not binding. No
commercial software organization is going to go down that route; it
would be suicide. The second is to demonstrate that the licence is
invalid. Given the amount of time GNU have spent working on it, wouldn't
we know by now?

The GPL is not a complicated document. Even I can understand it. And, as
far as I can tell, it *is* legally valid. If you have a suspicion of how
it could be legally broken - particularly in the current climate - I'd
be interested to hear.

Now, I haven't been following the Debian/Corel interactions, but, as I
understand it, Corel wanted to make their own distribution based on
Debian, and many key Debian developers agreed to cooperate with them.
What would it have mattered if they hadn't "got in bed with Corel", as
you put it? So Corel would have had a bit more work to do in order to
work out how Debian's base system works, but Debian isn't that hard for
a knowledgeable developer to understand. They could have done it without
Debian's help.

The nature of the GPL - and the other DFSG-compliant licences - is that
anyone can take it, modify it, and distribute it, as long as they abide
by the conditions of the licence. You can't say "anyone can distribute
Debian except for companies we don't like". Now, if Corel try to break
the GPL, they will rightfully be jumped on by all sides, and will lose
all credibility as free software developers. But Debian cannot say that
Corel can't do what they want with the distribution up to that point.
Whether or not we "got in bed" with them is simply irrelevant.

You can't have it both ways.

-- 
Colin Watson                                           [cjw44@cam.ac.uk]
Trinity College, Cambridge, and Computer Science         [riva.ucam.org]