gnu-misc-discuss
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: PJ comes to her senses -- finally


From: David Kastrup
Subject: Re: PJ comes to her senses -- finally
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:49:18 +0100
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.1.50 (gnu/linux)

Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

> In gnu.misc.discuss Rjack <user@example.net> wrote:
>> Over at Groklaw, Pammy Jo has finally come to her senses and admitted
>> that an idiot plaintiff like SCO can't attempt to license code under
>> the GPL to the general public and then later sue that purported class
>> of licensees for copyright infringement. She refers to Eben Moglen's
>> comment:
>
> This has been PJ's position all along - that code licensed under the
> GPL is code licensed under the GPL.  SCO's argument was that, because
> they "weren't fully aware" of what they were doing, they hadn't truly
> licensed their code, therefore people using it according to its
> licence's terms were thus violating that code's copyright.  Or
> something like that.

More like "somebody snuck code into their GPL distribution without
permission".  Say, in a mall somebody peels off a price tag from a cheap
article and sticks it to an expensive article.  An unrelated customer
picks the item up and carries it to the cash register.  He pays the lump
sum of $10 by credit card for an article worth $5000, the cashier does
not notice the discrepancy.  His supervisor later recognizes what has
happened, the customer has left the shop already.

A camera has recorded the act of moving the price tag and the person
doing it identified.  It is clear that this was the doing of somebody
not authorized to do anything in the shop.

Can the shop reclaim the article?


That's more or less the theory underlying SCO's claims.  The problem
with that view is that there is abundance evidence that the price tag
was "moved" by shop personnel, not just authorized to do this sort of
thing in general, but explicitly in the course of a business strategy.

SCO is merely in possession of some UNIX rights as the legal successor
of Caldera, an explicit Linux company with a Linux strategy.  In fact,
the company still _is_ Caldera.  It merely renamed itself into "SCO
Group" for the purpose of making the most of this schizophrenic lawsuit.
And it only could do so because it happened to have acquired the rights
to the _name_ "SCO" as part of its previous business as Caldera.

They are just sheep in a wolf's clothing cheaply acquired, for the sake
of shedding crocodile tears before the court.  "Oh, my poor little
cubs!"

-- 
David Kastrup


reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]