7 Aug
2009
7 Aug
'09
11:16 a.m.
Raymond Martin wrote:
That's nice, but I would like for someone to show
me how this pertains to the
current line of discussion. The fact is that code does become GPL once you
mix it with other GPL code.
Hi Raymond :)
I searched the web and discussed this also off-list.
Today in the early morning I sent this to Paul:
"[snip]
There's another sentence, with an interesting issue in Germany. It can
become impossible to claim one's due, e.g. it's forbidden to decompile
software that's not GPL'd but be suspected to use GPL'd code. The one
who file a claim against the company that was violating the GPL
allegedly didn't decompile the software, but watched the booting. If he
would have decompiled the software, the court were not allowed to
pronounce the sentence against the company that violated the GPL.
[snip]"
Oops, after sending something on broken English I can see mistakes I
made, but I won't correct them, but I'll add that this was at
Oktober/04/2006, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License).
There's no file reference of the court, but for another example there is
a file reference, I don't guess this German Wiki is publishing a fake,
even if I didn't verify it extensive enough.
There are a lot of links on English saying the same. If you violate the
GPL, you're still the copyright holder of your own code and it's not
allowed to decompile it by others and it won't become GPL'd
automatically, in addition in Germany you are even not allowed to
decompile code in order to prove that there was GPL'd code stolen.
You are wrong, or German courts are wrong and lawyers, maybe faked
lawyers, are liars. There are a lot of "translations" of the GPL's legal
terminology in the web. I don't think this will be a big conspiracy, so
I won't verify all those links. A lot of links to this topic were posted
before.
Cheers,
Ralf
Whether you choose to break the promise you
are making when you distribute it is another thing. That promise is something
that is made with the license automatically whenever the application is
distributed, just one thing a license can do that a contract would need a
bilateral agreement for.
Perhaps you should read that paragraph again in the context of how this
whole discussion came about. Known free software, with a history of being
free, distributed under the GPL with the source code in the past, was not
being distributed with the source code at a point by the very same people.
So where would the altered terms be if the binary was decompiled and source
distributed for the application under consideration?
The terms would be the same as they were in the past. Thus, there is
nothing stopping the distribution of the code regardless of how it is
obtained in this one particular case. It can be forced open in this case
because it would result in code that was intended to be under the GPL in
the first place, not some other license. There is a whole trail of evidence
that can easily show it was and is GPL. The code could hardly be considered
proprietary.
An extensive look at license vs. contract for the GPL is found in
Enforcing the GPL - http://www.sapnakumar.org/EnfGPL.pdf
Raymond