Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy

[ZnU]

In article <ol5gl.3415$Jd4.1769@newsfe02.iad>,
 Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote:

> David Kastrup wrote:
> > Since when?  If I send a personal letter to someone, I don't charge a
> > fee for it.  He still is not authorized for redistributing my letter or
> > using its content in publications of his.
> 
> This is the usual argument of the "GPL is invalid" claimers.
> They say that they can honor the part of the GPL which allows
> anyone to make copies and distribute them but ignore the part
> of the license which tells them what they must do in return.
> 
> It's just like when you buy a car. You are told that you may
> drive away with the car in return for a sum of money, and you
> accept the "drive away with the car part" and do so, but say
> that you do not need to honor the "in return for a sum of
> money" part. It's unlikely that the forces of the law will be
> amused by the argument in the case of the car or the GPL.

There is no *technical* reason why a court could not find the "in return 
for a sum of money" clause unconscionable and invalidate it by itself. 
This would be exceedingly unlikely to ever happen in the case of the 
scenario mentioned above, of course. And it's probably not going to 
happen with the GPL either, though that can't be said with quite the 
same degree of certainty.

-- 
"What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them
‹ that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer
apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too
small, but whether it works [...]"        -- Barack Obama, January 20th, 2008