Re: SFLC's GPL court enforcement -- track record

[David Kastrup]

Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> writes:

> rjack wrote:
>> The trouble is you can't write a copyright license that controls
>> "all third parties" as long "as they follow the GPL". Congress
>> specifically forbid this situation with 17 USC sec. 301.
>
> That's the federal preemption clause. What does that
> have to do with anything? Who says anything about
> controlling anyone? The distributor is licensing the
> code to all third parties under the terms of the GPL.

Uh no.  Third parties are not involved.  Only recipients.  In GPLv2,
there was a clause that you could replace source code with a written
offer to source code, and this offer had to be valid for any third party
(namely, any downstream recipients) and had to be passed on to any such
third party.  That was a very specific circumstance and only made third
parties involved when you _used_ that option.

GPLv3 contains no such option AFAICS.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum