Posted on 09/21/2007 9:11:32 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Good point...
Obviously because your making a false assumption on their behalf that using copyright for copyLEFT is already an established right. But it’s not, this is according to reports actually the first case where Stallman’s license is being tested by a US court, so I don’t assume the leftists are going to win, nor do I claim they have rights which don’t exist yet. Being generally opposed to leftists, I hope they get creamed. My right.
None of those definitions of “free” support Stallman’s position of “giving derivatives of use back”. They don’t seem to support having to give anything back, else it wouldn’t be “free”.
Simple yes or no answer to this please:
You are hoping that the intellectual property of two individuals, Erik Andersen and Rob Landley, (specifically, copyrighted software developed by those two individuals) can be appropriated without compensation by the company known as Monsoon Multimedia Inc., solely because you dislike the author of the license that they used on their own software?
Just a yes or no, please, no temporizing or rationalizing.
The “software freedom law center” is who is bringing the charges, which is probably just another front for Stallman like the FSF and GNU groups, and yes I hope they lose and this tricky license of theirs is shown to actually be a contract, but non-binding since they don’t have it in writing that any tricky contract was agreed to by all parties.
Copyleft is not a right, nor have I ever alluded to it as such. Copyleft is a licensing principle which was in practice long before the term was coined. The right I speak of is Copyright which allows the holder to license their material under any license that does not violate contract law.
There is a reason that this has not been in court, every time the fsf goes to a company who violates the license and point it out that company and, presumably, their legal team realise the have to comply (CISCO ring any bells)? his is according to reports actually the first case where Stallman’s license is being tested by a US court
Yes they are going to test the license, not copyright itself. I have little doubt the GPL will be upheld ans *nobody* has ever given a solid legal reason it should not be. You have to prove the GPL violates contract law in order to invalidate it and unless you can point at a particular aspect of copyright law it violates I have yet so see one.
Bookmarking to reference in the future that you support theft of IP.
Ladies and gentlemen there you have it this is the *first* time on FreeRepublic I have ever seen someone advocate for people to have their property and rights taken from them solely because of a dislike for a third parties political positions.
Oh, and to follow up, you do realize that even if exactly what you say comes to pass, this puts the people you're cheering on in a worse light, because then they have absolutely no license or contract to even possess or use the code that they've stolen, let alone modify and redistribute it? In the absence of a valid license, it would revert back to copyright law...
Not what I said at all of course, nowhere did I say the owners should have their rights to their property taken away. Go ahead and beat up all the strawmen you want, but the lawsuit is over copyLEFT, which is unproven leftist theory.
Not at all, you're obviously forgetting the lawsuit is from the copyleftists who want the code that someone else developed. Someone else who never gave theirs away as "free".
The implication of your post is very clear, if you care to retract it Im all ears..
yes I hope they lose and this tricky license of theirs is shown to actually be a contract, but non-binding since they don’t have it in writing that any tricky contract was agreed to by all parties.
So you hope that the court rules that Monsoon, against the wishes of the copyright holders, acted appropriately in taking and using code in a manner not permitted by the owners.
Regarding the part in bold. I am assuming you think the BSD license should also be invalidated? After all I have used many BSD distros but I have never gotten anything in writing.
You can believe whatever you want, but the fact is the BSD license isn’t a “reciprocal” license like Stallman’s. Monsoon obviously should have used BSD instead of Linux to avoid having to deal with all the copyleftists. That’s what Slingbox did, which makes a similar device to the one from Monsoon. Works great, we have 2 of them in fact, and Slinbox didn’t have to deal with Stallman or give any of their code away either. Hopefully more companies will see the advantages and start using BSD as well.
Ill try again with formatting..
“but the fact is the BSD license isn’t a “reciprocal” license like Stallman’s.”
It has terms attached * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
* Neither the name of the nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
There are require terms of the license which, by your logic, are not legally binding in any way shape or form.
No, the lawsuit is from authors who don't want their work packaged and sold by someone else without compensation. You understand that by your position, i.e., that the GPL is invalid, that since Monsoon doesn't have ANY license to use or modify the code, that the authors can essentially claim every dollar of Monsoon's revenue.
Your logic would also invalidate end-user license agreements. If that happened, there's nothing stopping me from repackaging Windows and selling it as kevkromOS at 75% off Microsoft's prices.
My logic is sound and proven by your own posts: software released under Stallman’s license isn’t “free” even if they tell you it is. Use BSD licensed code instead and you can avoid copyleftists.
That's pretty bolshevik of you, I must say.
We have firmly established that he doesn't believe rights are equal. Infringing on copyright, even for large-scale profit, is fine by him as long as he doesn't like the person whose copyright is being infringed. The confirming example was Linksys/Cisco distributing millions of unlicensed copies of Linux with their routers.
If they want to prohibit Monsoon from using the software that is their right, but when they give it away as “free software” instead this is the kinds of problems it causes. It’s all a leftist plot considering the moonbats involved as far as I’m concerned.
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