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And, the GPL will be proved to be effective in a US court! | 197 comments | Create New Account
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And, the GPL will be proved to be effective in a US court!
Authored by: tiger99 on Friday, September 14 2012 @ 09:51 AM EDT
The GPL has been upheld in court in various places, but I am not sure if it has in a major case in the US, yet. When Red Hat win, and it becomes common knowledge, it will be a very big win for the GPL, and others may stop and think a bit more clearly before violating it.

Maybe others such as the Busybox developers will be able to stop fighting constant GPL violations, and have more time to spend on what they are good at, which is developing code. Admittedly, they and their lawyers have been rather good at defending the GPL too.

There may however be an undesirable side effect. The typical PB, when faced with the knowledge that Twin Peaks have been thrashed in court for GPL violation, may not take sufficient time to ask why, and just place a complete embargo on the use of GPL code in their business. We know there is no need for that, because any business can adapt its working practices, with minimal difficulty, to be able to use GPL code legally. The requirements placed on developers and distributors are not particularly onerous, and there are no significant restrictions at all on end users.

Maybe we should all spend a bit more time explaining the GPL to our local PHB? They tend to believe what the read in the likes of Forbes, which is typically very inaccurate where FOSS is concerned. Actually, I think it is intentionally inaccurate about almost everything, but that is another topic altogether.

As an aside, my employer has re-organised, and there are now effectively two seperate companies in the building where I work, one headquartered elsewhere. The IT manager of the "other" company, a die-hard Gates worshipper, was recently made redundant, and funnily enough the department now works more efficiently. But out new IT manager is based on the other site. He was here the other day, and told me that he has been nearly 20 years in UNIX and Linux. Already our new internal intranet is running on a Linux server. The PHB several levels up from me appointed him, knowing his background. Things are looking up.....

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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