On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, Gerald Combs wrote:
> 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.
I would have to say that it is pretty clear to me as well. From a
copyright point of view, ClearSight's product will not run without
Ethereal. It depends completely on Ethereal. It was written to build on
top of Ethereal. Therefore it is a _derived work_ and clearly must fall
under the GPL.
My thinking is that our next step in this matter is to get Eben Moglen of
the FSF to talk to them, or initiate a lawsuit.
We do not need to assign copyright to the FSF to have Moglen look into the
issue and call ClearSight. They acted on the Samba team's bahalf some six
years ago when a company tried to sell Samba as their own product.
Regards
-----
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe[at]richardsharpe.com, rsharpe[at]samba.org,
sharpe[at]ethereal.com, http://www.richardsharpe.com
