🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <21046@usc.edu> annala%neuro.usc.edu@usc.edu (A J Annala) writes:
>federal intellectual property laws allow.  The simple fact that RMS/FSF 
>openly consent to the distribution of GNU software without charge and 
>with no prior agreement in the form of an oral/written contract/license 
>pretty much precludes any real possibility of successfully maintaining
>a legal action to either restrict distribution or obtain damages for 
>nonconformance with the terms of the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE. 

Neither you nor I are competent to give a legal opinion, so I won't give
one.  Just the same, the actions you say FSF can't do aren't actions FSF
would want to do.  They don't want to restrict software distribution, and
they don't want damages.  They simply want people to share software.
So there's a third possibility you haven't considered.

The third possibility is to sue to require the violator to distribute
code derived from Gnu under the terms of the Gnu license; i.e. if they
distribute binaries they must provide source and allow the recipients
to give away their source.  This could include turning over a copy of
all derived code to FSF.  In practice, with NeXT and Data General it
was unnecessary to sue to accomplish this; after having the Gnu
license requirements pointed out to them they made their gcc-based
compilers available to FSF for distribution.

As I'm not a lawyer, I won't venture an opinion as to whether such a
suit would be successful.  But evidently NeXT's and Data General's
lawyers took the possibility seriously, or at least decided to "do the
right thing".
-- 
-- Joe Buck, just visiting/consulting at Entropic
-- write me at: jbuck@janus.berkeley.edu 
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