Richard Urwin wrote:
From: Ronnie Sahlberg [mailto:ronnie_sahlberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
wouldnt he be interested in running a case
to its full
fuition?
where out of court settlement were not a viable option?
It is not clear to me that it isn't viable. ClearSight has to release their
patches to Ethereal. But, IIUC, if they can produce a product that works
with or without the ethereal DLL then they could charge for that, and
provide Ethereal under GPL as a plug-in. Or they could provide Ethereal as a
seperate executable, running in a seperate window. ISTR their app does more
than just wrap Ethereal, although Ethereal is probably the majority of the
functionality. An Ethereal patch to produce a DLL would have value to the
Ethereal project.
It's pretty clear to me. The GPL makes a distinction between combining
works to make a "whole," and "mere aggregation." The Ethereal DLL is
not a separate, independent executable file. It is a code module that
has been linked with Analyzer, and depends on Analyzer for execution.
The GPL FAQ has a couple of questions concerning this, including this one:
http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LinkingOverControlledInterface
(Most of the content in that section of the FAQ applies here, in fact).
It was clearly the intent of the GPL to prohibit this sort of thing.
If they had created some sort of RPC frontend for Ethereal and turned it
into a service running under Windows they'd be fine. As it stands,
they're in direct violation of Ethereal's copyright.
Now at least the DLL situation would be right in the middle of the GPL grey
area, so I think we should consult our consciences and the FSF legal team.
Not necessarily in that order.
I would guess that ClearSight would still not go to court, even if the
alternative was taking the Analyser off the market. Rather just do that,
than do that and pay court costs.
--
Richard Urwin, Private
"No 9000 series computer has ever made a mitsake or corrubiteddatatato."
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