GPL compliance

[Gary W. Swearingen]

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

> Yes you did. You said we were banking on the hope that the authors of
> the code in the CD "have previously licensed the software to everyone
> with some kind of general public license, be it FSF GPL, BSD, MIT, X11,
> etc." We are not banking on a hope, we choose a distribution that uses
> only free software.

If you don't have proof, which you don't, then you're left with hope.
Users of any IP must hope (or call it "trust") that they haven't been
mislead (by guile OR ignorance).  You take your minor legal risks and
move on with life.  A few people get burned, and I'll even dare to
note the companies that got cease and desist letters from SCO and had
to spend big bucks dealing with it.  I'm saying that legal risks are
unavoidable and IF you want to consider risks, there are some to be
considered in what we were talking about.

> Maybe you should look up "re-licensing" in a dictionary. The ability to
> re-license is a cornerstone of free software.

Of course it is, but it's subject to terms and conditions, a few of
which we were discussing, or so I thought.

>> From 17 USC 103:
>> 
>>     The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to
>>     the material contributed by the author of such work, as
>>     distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work,
>>     [...]
>
> Thank you for demonstrating that it is you who doesn't understand
> copyright law. You can't distinguish between owning the copyright to
> something and having a copyright license that allows re-licensing. I
> rest my case.

I don't even see a case there.  But it sounds like this is a good
time to rest it, in any case.