Clause 4 of the GPL talks about when you violate the GPL your right to use
the software and your licence is revoked.
Interestingly enough there is nothing I could find that specifies how a
licence can be reaquired after it once has been terminated.
Perhaps a termination of licence to use the GPL software is permanent and
can not be regranted? Too bad.
Should we add new updated GPL licence boilerplates that clarifies :
This licence applies to all users that adhere to the licence and respects
it.
People/Company X is not covered by this licence since they have had it
terminated by deliberately violating the GPL.
Thus People/Company X may not even use this software for internal/private
use. Sorry.
Any use or redistribution of this software by People/Company X is
unlicenced and illegal.
Then we can have a file in the distribution that lists all people/companies
that have had their licence revoked and thus can no longer
use the software in any form.
I read the GPL as that there is no way to regrant a licence after it has
once been terminated for a certain party.
This would mean that this file would be append-only since no one would ever
be removed from it.
Question then is should we only add companies to this list or should we
also add the employees of that companie (as many of them as we can find
out?)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Sharpe"
Sent: Monday, April 12, 2004 8:45 AM
Subject: Re: [Ethereal-dev] ClearSight/GPL update
> On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, Richard Sharpe wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, Guy Harris wrote:
> >
> > > On Sun, Apr 11, 2004 at 02:58:58PM -0700, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> > > > In addition, whether or not OLE serves to sufficiently distance
Ethereal
> > > > from the ClearSight product depends on the implementation technique.
If it
> > > > uses any form of dynamic linking, then I think they still have a
problem
> > > > with theirs being a derived work. However, I am not familiar enough
with
> > > > OLE to be able to say.
> > >
> > > The impression I have is that an OLE server (Ethereal is presumably
> > > acting as an OLE server) can either be "in-process", in which case
it's
> > > a DLL and requests from the client to the server are done by loading
the
> > > DLL if it's not already loaded and calling code in the DLL, or
> > > "out-of-process", in which case it's a separate executable and some
> > > interprocess message channel is used to convey the request and the
> > > results.
> >
> > This is interesting.
> >
> > > If it's in-process, that's a form of dynamic linking; I'd say only
> > > software with a GPL-compatible license could use a GPL'ed in-process
> > > server.
> >
> > I would tend to agree with this.
> >
> > > If it's out-of-process, you could probably argue that the connection
> > > between the client and server doesn't require that a GPL'ed
> > > out-of-process server be used only by clients with GPL-compatible
> > > licenses.
> >
> > I would tend to agree with this. If this is the case, ClearSight could
> > make their case that they are not a derived work stronger by making
other
> > packet capture and analysis engines for Windows work with their product.
>
> It should be noted that simply re-implementing to cross some artificial
> barrier to try to avoid copyright law, is not sufficient, as far as I
> understand these things.
>
> That is, if they were a derived work before they changed the interface,
> and their only reason for changing the interface was to try to avoid the
> provisions of the copyright law, I think they are still violating our
> licence.
>
> We need to have competent advice on these issues.
>
> I am copying this discussion to another list where we might get some
> answers.
>
> Regards
> -----
> Richard Sharpe, rsharpe[at]richardsharpe.com, rsharpe[at]samba.org,
> sharpe[at]ethereal.com, http://www.richardsharpe.com
>
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