On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 09:34:15AM -0400, zentena@hophead.dyndns.org wrote:
On May 16, 2003 08:15 am, Dave Smith wrote:
However, if the seller sells it under a license which gives the buyer the rights to copy and distribute it freely, then anyone has the right to use that code themselves. I could have taken a Caldera CD and given it to someone at IBM, and they'd be perfectly within their rights to copy that code into the Linux kernel.
But did the seller ? You can't claim because something is hidden on a GPL CD that the person who owns the rights has given up those rights.
You can if the CD seller is also the person who holds those rights. If I buy a CD from Caldera containing the Linux kernel, and the Linux kernel docs say "this code is licensed under the GPL", then as far as I am concerned, Caldera have licensed the code to me under the GPL. If they didn't have the right to license it under the GPL then that's another matter, but if their claim of ownership of the disputed code is valid, they *do* have the right. The owner of the disputed code has sold me a CD stating that I am allowed to redistribute that code under the GPL.
The point is that Caldera have continued to distribute codeto their customers which they claim to be "tainted". They have distributed this
They'll claim they did this to stop the "evidence" from being destroyed.
Whatever their motives were for distributing the code, they've done it. They have licensed their customers to distribute the disputed code on the CDs. Period. The only way in which they could revoke that license is by demonstrating that they were not entitled to grant the license it in the first place - i.e. they don't own the disputed code - and therefore the rest of their case falls to pieces. Whether Caldera have a case against IBM and other distributions for earlier damages, I'm not sure. However, as I see it, they won't be able to prevent the continued distribution and development of Linux. Again, IANAL, and these are my opinions, not ST's. -- David Smith Work Email: Dave.Smith@st.com STMicroelectronics Home Email: David.Smith@ds-electronics.co.uk Bristol, England GPG Key: 0xF13192F2