GPL compliance

[Alexander Skwar]

Gary W. Swearingen wrote:

> Repeat for all other GPL-using owners and similarly for owners who use
> other licenses like X's.  Of course, nobody has the time to actually
> do all of this.

Actually, your "of course" is wrong. As has been mentioned before,
for Debian, there's the debian-legal mailing list/group, which checks
each and every package. I'll bet my a**, that every other (serious)
distributor does have more or less the same. And actually, checking isn't
*that* hard. Sure, it's a burden when you start up new, but it would
be overly foolish to not check this.

Anyway - Canonical Ltd. is labeling Ubuntu (live CD at least) as
Free Software (the word meaning of "free", not the beer one). And
thus I take no risk in presuming that it *IS* Free Software. If it
weren't, it were Canonical's fault for granting permissions that
aren't there. And as that's so, it can very well be argued, that
Daniel (or whoever wrongly distributes a de-facto Non-Free software
compiliation, which was labeled as Free software) doesn't have any
risk at all. Just check the law.

>  They take (minor) legal risks and hope nobody will
> care -- a very good bet.

They don't take any risk.

>  In this case, Daniel hopes that Ununtu's
> original publisher has done a good job so Daniel doesn't need to do
> all the research to prove himself 100% legally pure.

Nope. If Canonical would be erraneous, it would be their fault - not
Daniels.

Alexander Skwar
-- 
BOFH Excuse #382:

Someone was smoking in the computer room and set off the halon systems.