I think that was the most important defeat of violators of a FOSS license so
far, in the US. It did not involve the GPL, but it would be rather difficult to
see that as more than a mere technicality, as a FOSS license was successfully
upheld and there is not a lot of difference in principle. Look at it as
violating the only licence that was available to allow copying, and thus falling
foul of simple copyright law, and it seems to me (IANAL) that it scarcely
matters what the licence was, the problem was that they breached its terms,
resulting in a simple case of copying with no valid license to do so. Even a
very weak license like BSD would stand up to that, I think. And, there are ways
of violating the BSD license, such as failing to include the licence on the copy
you distribute. Every license has conditions that you can violate, if you are
sufficiently stupid, or just plain criminal. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|