Re: [Gnu-arch-users] licensing question

[Andrew Suffield]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2006 at 03:51:28PM -0800, Thomas Lord wrote:
> So what do you think?  The GPL allows this, right?

I believe so, yes. I believe you could raise a valid question in court
about whether or not you lose your right to create modified versions
of the works in question by issuing this contract; the answer to that
one is not obvious to me.

Support contracts are predisposed to limit what you can do with the
thing being supported, because the supporting organisation has limited
capabilities. This one is not particularly unusual. The client retains
the option of cancelling the contract and resuming their full
privileges under the GPL.

The GPL is designed for the goal of ensuring that the body public can
do whatever they want with the work, under the 'information wants to
be free' assumption that says: if there are no stigmata attached to
the public for having a copy, then they will obtain one despite the
best efforts of the people trying to keep it secret. 'Two men can keep
a secret when one of them is dead'.

It does not attempt to prevent individuals from entering into
contracts which later restrict their exercise of the privileges
granted by the GPL. I think that's a deliberate feature. It wouldn't
be a free license if it tried to make such restrictions.

It is presumed that the free market will dispose of excessively
onerous contracts, because no single vendor accrues advantage from
having a monopoly on the ability to provide support
services. Essentially, if redhat's support contract is too
restrictive, everybody will just buy novell's support contract
instead. The market will select the optimal tradeoff points between
contract restrictions, support effectiveness (which *is* improved by
this contract), and cost.

In essence, this is not relevant to the purpose of the GPL. You can't
solve everything with a software license.