SCO, the Unix company who has recently been attacking the General Public License (GPL) as legally invalid and a destroyer of intellectual property value, is now proud to include an important GPLed application in its latest product.
In one breath SCO CEO, Darl McBride, recently said “At the end of the day, the GPL is not about making software free; it’s about destroying value”, and in the next hawked the latest release of OpenServer containing the GPLed Samba3.
The Samba group has been under pressure from some to change their licensing to forbid SCO to include Samba in any of their products. Unlike SCO, they are sticking to their principles, and those of the GPL which allow for use by anyone.
An interesting legal question is raised by SCO’s actions as the GPL states that violations of the GPL automatically terminate the license. If SCO violates the GPL, they no longer have a license to distribute the software and standard copyright law applies - which forbids any redistribution without the copyright holder’s permission.
If the GPL is legally invalid as SCO claims then again standard copyright law applies and SCO certainly doesn’t have the Samba group’s permission to redistribute Samba outside the GPL.
Our legal word of the day is: estoppel
1: a bar to the use of contradictory words or acts in asserting a claim or right against another
esp
: “equitable estoppel” in this entry2 a: a bar to the relitigation of issues
b: the affirmative defense of estoppel
From FindLaw legal dictionary.
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2003 at 8:06 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.