Front page | perl.perl6.licenses |
Postings from January 2001
Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> wrote: > >Ben Tilly <ben_tilly@hotmail.com> writes: > > "Bradley M. Kuhn" <bkuhn@ebb.org> wrote: [...] > > MY understanding after having talked to a number of licensing experts > > about it in other places is that the GPL is both a copyright license and > > a contract. > > > For instance look at item 5. A copyright license is a license written > > by the copyright holder. There is no accepting or not accepting it. > > But a contract is an agreement, it must be accepted. The GPL is > > something with terms and conditions that you may or may not choose to > > accept. If you do not accept the contract then you do not have any > > right to the freedoms it can grant. > >That's the way it's phrased, but I think it's somewhat unclear whether >that makes it a real contract. Real contracts tend to require signatures >(or a click on "I Accept," which I expect to have similar force in law >due to the number of people with money who are using that). EULAs may >get a special legal exception due to the money behind the organizations >that want EULAs to work, but free software licenses can't take advantage >of that in general. EULAs are generally placed on a sealed envelope so >that there's some physical action that can be pointed to as an act of >acceptance, and the equivalents for free software involve really annoying >distribution hassles like MIT used to have to do for Kerberos and which we >really don't want to get into. The status *is* unclear. However at one point I mentioned to people who should know that I thought that the GPL was intended to be a copyright statement with an offer of contract, and I was told in no uncertain terms that I had hit the nail on the head. A very good article on the topic even if the lawsuits discussed didn't actually happen: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/2000/1/ I would wager that if the FSF does ever take one of these to court, their claim will be that the GPL is a contract, and they will seek relief under the applicable law for contracts, not copyright violation. Cheers, Ben _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com