GPL compliance

[Gary W. Swearingen]

Daniel Carrera <daniel.carrera at zmsl.com> writes:

> On Fri, 2006-30-06 at 10:46 -0700, Gary W. Swearingen wrote:
>
>> Because Ubuntu users must be licensed by Red Hat or they can't use Red
>> Hat's IP.
>
> You still don't understand re-licensing do you?

(I have a suprising admission to make below, so please read thru.)

I understand that if you haven't been licensed to use an exclusive
right by its owner or his agent, then you may not use it.  And the
GPL creates no such agent. (More later.)

So I guess I don't understand what you mean by the term or why you
have used it here.  The term is sufficiently informal that it has
multiple meanings.

You apparently are thinking of the one where an primary licensor
licenses to the secondary licensor the primary's right to license the
primary's right to license the primary's rights.  This is possible and
sometimes done, but the GPL does no such thing.  Or the primary could
license the secondary as his agent.  The GPL doesn't do that either.
(I'm unsure if these are the same thing, in law, or not, but it
doesn't matter for this thread.)

The GPL is a typical license which licenses rights to copy, derive,
and publish, under T & C.  If an OS publisher is a re-licensor at all,
it only means that he is licensing his ownership in a derivative.

In any case, if you have a GPL relationship with Canonical, that only
covers their IP (***); nothing in the GPL between them and Red Hat
removes your need to be in a GPL relationship with Red Hat.  If you
think it does, give us a GPL quote for it.

***: Unless you want to consider that the license controls your use of
a third party's IP, which does, in a way.  But only in conformance
with your required license with that third party.

>> The meaning of IP is obvious and there's no good reason to avoid its use.
>
> IP is a term known to be vague, as it can refer to copyrights,
> trademarks, patents and even contracts. You should know that. Maybe
> you're just not very familiar with law...

I do know that, and I also know that it's OK to use a generic term to
cover a specific one.  On further thought, I'll admit to using the
term for the converse reason that RMS doesn't want you to use it.
(Except I don't mean to drag in patents, etc.)  Spefically, I probably
used it as a reminder, to those who seem to need it, that open source
licenses are about proprietary/property rights, to counter the
too-often-seen implication that "open" or "free" means
"non-proprietary".  (I might have gone along with the over-stretching
of the meaning if the GPL had been written to allow non-infective
linking to X, BSD, and similar code, but the reasons behind that
feature of the GPL are just too similar to the things we don't like
about even more restrictive licenses.)

>> >> Ransom Love is a kernel developer, 
>> >
>> > This was very funny. Ransom Love was the CEO of Caldera, and is an MBA
>> 
>> Sorry if I named the wrong guy.  Poor memory for names.
>
> Are you confident that your memory for copyright law is better?

Absolutely.  BTW, it should have been "Robert Love".


My admission is my realization that some of the Red Hat IP is not
covered by the 3b magic statement because they did not get it under
GPL and so needn't provide its source.  Though CD publishers are
probably only deriving from source.  So this lesses your 3b magic
statement worries a tiny bit.  But there is Red Had code that they've
derived from under GPL, so my orginal statements are still valid.
Canonical and Red Hat would both have GPL relationships with
re-publisher Daniel where clause 3 matters similarly for each.

That is, since some code in the CD is a Red-Hat-derivative-under-GPL
(derived, say from Linus's code, in an improvement) Red Hat is (still)
obligated to supply the source of their derivative under clause 3,
even if Canonical is too.  And Daniel is obligated to (but will
probably not, taking a very minor risk) pick 3a, 3b, or 3c and satisfy
it for each of his many licensing relationships.  I don't see how his
Red Hat obligation is satisfied by a 3c offer by Canonical, but that's
for Daniel to worry about (or not, probably).  In other words, I think
he's obliged by the many GPL licenses involved to (if he picks 3c for
all) do this for all owners:

    Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to
    distribute corresponding source code.

There are many offers involved, and much information about them all.

Again, I doubt if any published actually does this, it's just
something that a publisher should worry about if he's going to worry
about clause 3 at all.