🚀 go-pugleaf

dreier@lhasa.berkeley.edu (Roland Dreier) writes:

> So let me get this straight: Apple sued people, claiming their
> copyrights were infringed.  This, of course, was evil and perfectly
> valid grounds for a boycott.  USL is in the process of suing some
> people, claiming that their copyrights were infringed.  Of course,
> this is completely understandable and we shouldn't hold it against
> them.

It is not just why Apple or USL is suing, it is more an issue of
exactly what has been copyrighted.

Apple has copyrighted the "look and feel" of their Macintosh
interface.  The GPL does not believe that the "look and feel" of a
program should be considered the property of the program author.

Apple sues to protect their copyright, the GPL boycotts Apple because
they feel it is a silly copyright to begin with, and taking people to
court over the "look and feel" of a program is stupid.

USL, on the other hand has copyrighted the unpublished source code
used in their UNIX operating system.  USL believes that BSDI, by using
code from the Berkeley NET/2 release which the USL believes contains
their source code, has in effect "plagiarized", by effectively using
USL code in their OS release.

The GPL has not boycotted the USL, because they believe that an
author's source code, much in the same way that an author's manuscript
for a book, is the property of that author.

Regardless of where your beliefs lie, it is clear that these two
issues are very different.

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Kansas State University                 |  frain@cis.ksu.edu
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