Re: SFLC's GPL court enforcement -- track record

[Rahul Dhesi]

Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> writes:

>A settlement is a private agreement between parties, and it can be as
>formal or informal as they want. In any case, there is no reason that
>the fine details need to be made public, and the general tendency of
>lawyers is to keep things quiet, because what you don't say can't hurt
>you.

Your essential argument is that although they are hiding the actual
settlement, they are not hiding anything within it.  To me, this
argument seems logically absurd, especially because the settlement in
question intends to further the cause of open source software. The SFLC
is not just one more typical private party making private agreements --
it's a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization with protection and advancement
of free and open source software as its goal.

Lawyers hide information when they think doing so will benefit their
client. They yell loudly over rooftops (which they often do -- just look
at recent contoversies in the news or via news.google.com) when they
think doing so will benefit their client.

In this case, some lawyer thinks that hiding the settlement details will
benefit his client.  We just don't know which lawyer and which client.
-- 
Rahul
http://rahul.rahul.net/