[LAD] At the hands of Professor Keller and Raymond

[laseray at gmail.com]

On Monday 27 July 2009 16:02:47 Chris Cannam wrote:
> 2009/7/27 Jörn Nettingsmeier <nettings at folkwang-hochschule.de>:
> > which means that raymond has a point. and he is also entitled to forking
> > your project any way he sees fit.
>
> It isn't necessarily the case that he is entitled to fork it.  Raymond
> has repeatedly said that it was distributed to him without a GPL
> license.
>
> If a program is distributed to you under some proprietary terms, but
> it uses some GPL code, then it is presumably violating the terms of
> the GPL and so should not have been distributed.  Possible remedies
> depending on the circumstances might include GPL'ing the program or
> ceasing distribution.  But these are remedies between that program's
> distributors and the authors of the GPL'd code; the recipients of the
> improperly licensed program can't make any such remedy themselves.
> You can't just decide unilaterally that the ostensibly proprietary
> code was improperly licensed and so go and copy it to all your
> friends.
>
> In this case, the situation is probably moot since Bob has said he
> intended to publish under the GPL from the outset, but I think that is
> the only thing that might make this action defensible.

It is moot. I previously gave proof of the GPL header in one of the
Java files of one of the packages up on my project. So there was never
any question of whether this was GPL or proprietary.

Raymond