From: Adam L. Beberg (beberg@mithral.com)
Date: Fri Sep 15 2000 - 18:30:45 PDT
On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Gordon Mohr wrote:
> Sure, you'd be unpopular among many free/open source people.
> But would there, could there be a legal prosecution? Who would
> have to bring that case and what damages might apply? Has
> there ever been such a court prosecution?
The authors in theory, if they had the megabucks to invoke
LegalSystem(), could try to sue, but I believe the standing legal
opinion of the GPL is "if you challenge it, it will fall". It's never
been to court.
The GPL is enforced purely on the basis of peer pressure, and as such is
far more of a social contract then anything else.
The moral: Avoid GPL'd code like the black plague, there is no good
reason to touch it when a BSD style version of anything the GPL folks
do always exists within a couple days anyway.
- Adam L. Beberg
Mithral Communications & Design, Inc.
The Cosm Project - http://cosm.mithral.com/
beberg@mithral.com - http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
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