> The bottom line is to make sure you have all the details and the
> facts, from the entire document before you go on a fight with
> Novell. Also, if you want to enlist help in a fight, you should do
> all the leg work in a well documented fashion so potential enlistees
> have all the details they need to believe your cause.
>
> In this case, I don't think you have cause, unless the agreement you
> cite is not this same one I am looking at.
>
> Interesting excersize, anyway.
First let me say that it is good to see this kind of discussion. It
means people truly care about software freedom and not just obtaining
software for free!
Based on the dialog, I agree with Technomage that it just seems wrong
what SuSE (Novell) is doing here. I also agree with Alan, that based on
the licensing agreements they are stating that the software they own
copyright on is treated in a certain (non-free) way. Being the
copyright holder they are allowed to license their work however they see
fit.
I think it is important to take the time to legally explain why they can
do this. The legal question is SuSE vX.X a "single" program or
"several" programs put on the same distribution chain? Is it
"aggregration" or "combination"? Combining two programs of conflicting
license is not legal. However aggregating two programs into a single
distribution chain generally is. For example many people's beloved
KDE's underlying toolkit (Qt) was not compatible with the GPL for some
time. Yet it could still be distributed with other GPL programs like
the Linux kernel. As such, SuSE can bundle("aggregate") their
proprietary software along with a myriad of other licensed works and
release it as SuSE vX.X.
A good exercise would be to actually validate that the software they are
copyrighting and distributing as their own doesn't contain code from a
Free Software base and that it doesn't "combine" with any other Free
Software. Of course, much like viability (for those that like to debate
abortion) what constitutes "combining" is up for debate. For those that
have been around a while I think "combining" is the replacement word for
"linking". ; )
I am not a lawyer. So apply salt as you see fit. You can see the FSF's
position on this here [0].
-Derek Neighbors
[0]
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation
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