Re: Groklaw attacks Alexander

[amicus_curious]

"Rjack" <user@example.net> wrote in message 
xuadnc0zg923zgzXnZ2dnUVZ_oGdnZ2d@giganews.com">news:xuadnc0zg923zgzXnZ2dnUVZ_oGdnZ2d@giganews.com...

> FACT: No claim for any relief requested by an S.F.L.C. plaintiff
> has ever been granted by a federal court.
The spin here is that it has never been necessary to go to judgment due to 
the defendant always yielding to the impeccable logic of the SFLC.  Multiple 
instances of this have been cited ad nauseam here and in Groklaw and many 
other places.

What is  always ignored, however, is that the real issue of interest is 
never in play.  The GPL essentially allows anyone to do anything with 
everything GPL with the sole provision that the doer pass onto any 
downstream user the source materials involved, including the license text 
itself.  Anyone making direct use of the GPL program is even indemnified by 
the GPL to automatically receive permission even if the materials are not 
supplied by the upstream distributor.  No money is required to change hands 
unless the distributor wants to charge for "support" or for the cost of 
generating the copies of the material involved.

That is a wonderfully benevolent position until someone makes a contribution 
that is actually worth some money to downstream users. ( I am not familiar 
with any case where that has actually occurred and perhaps some FOSS 
advocate could point to one.)  Regardless, it has never been an issue in any 
of the SFLC actions which have centered around an author using the BusyBox 
utilities for a Linux compatible program without publishing the source 
materials for the BusyBox version used.  The "settlement" has universally 
been for the defendant to simply publish or otherwise provide access to the 
material on a web link somewhere.  In the Verizon case, that was performed 
by the Verizon supplier rather than Verizon itself, which was promptly 
deemed an adequate move and the plaintiff moved for dismissal.

Such a low cost or no cost solution to the case has to always be preferable 
to even a slight bit of litigation expense and so the SFLC is destined to 
always "win" such victories.  I have never heard of a case where the 
defendant was trying to protect the disclosure of some improvement to the 
original GPL program that had commercial value.  Until that happens, the 
whole issue remains a silly academic tempest in a teapot.