Novell and SuSE

On Saturday 2004-01-17 19:16, Derek Neighbors wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-01-17 at 18:21, Chris Gehlker wrote:
> > If you understand this an actually want to grant rights to
> > organizations as opposed to individuals, more power to you.
>
> You make good points at times, but statements like this are damaging.
> You don't grant your rights to organizations OPPOSED to individuals.
>
> You grant your rights to organizations AS WELL AS to individuals.

In a sense you are both wrong. GPL grants rights to legal entities. This
means that when you work for a firm who have based in-house code on GPL, and
you use the resulting object code on the job, you have no right to see the
source, copy the source, or distribute the source. In effect, a firm can
keep code private as long as it does not distribute the source.

One could argue that GPL code is only becomes eligible for free redistribution
when it is actually distributed across boundaries between firms. (For
example, merely using in-house CSR software as an employee or Search Engine
software as a customer does not produce a right to source code and its
redistribution.) Furthermore, it is not clear that the GPL is effective so
long as a holder of original GPL infected code only distributes the novel
code to employees and subcontrators since the owner can argue that the
distribution crosses no boundry that activates the redistribution clause.

Chris wants redistribution rights to be invoked with mere *use*. Furthermore,
allowing an actor to use the object code, even if the actor were an employee
or subcontractor, would explicitly cross a boundry between legal entities
producing carte-blanche rights for the using party to obtain and redistribute
source code.