On Fri, 5 Mar 2004 kpneal@pobox.com wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 10:44:08AM -0600, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
>
> > GNU Public License incompatibility is not our problem. The GPL, by
> > the way, may turn out to be as indefensible as many thought it was
> > all along. Take note the mud that the MPlayer group is stirring up.
> > Peter Wilmar Christensen, while denying the specific allegations,
> > essentially maintains that certain provisions of the GPL void the
> > entire thing:
> >
> >     We have confirmed what we already knew, that when using code
> >     licensed under the GPL then we have to publish any derivative
> >     work.  This means that the legal foundation is very thin and
> >     there is no place in the world that I know of where the GPL
> >     has been tested in court.  So from a business perspective I
> >     would say that the license is relatively weak.
> >
> > The entire interview is reproduced here:
> >
> >     http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design6/news.html
>
> Oh boo. Lots of things haven't been tested in court. That doesn't imply
> they won't stand up in court. My ownership of my house hasn't been tested
> in court. That doesn't mean I'm in danger of losing my house.  This
> interview is just FUD from someone trying to avoid responsibility for not
> respecting the license in borrowed source. Eben Moglen (council for the
> FSF) has an excellent speech transcribed here:
>
> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040226003735733
>
> See around time [25:08] to [30:02]

The argument, in a nutshell, is that if you take the trouble to void
the GPL, you'll have *no* license to redistribute, rather than free
license. It sounds convincing, but observe that Eben Moglen is putting
words in his adversaries mouth. We can't know that that's actually why
no one has challenged the GPL.

While Eben Moglen is an entertaining speaker -- I especially liked
the crack about Sonny Bono -- he and Richard Stallman typically take
credit for the entire Open Source movement, failing to acknowledge any
other license except the GNU Public License. It's easy to make a
strawman of Microsoft and similiar commercial enterprises. When
you're talking about slapping a GPL on top of an existing work,
already distributed under another Open Source license, the moral
arguments become less compelling (and possibly the legal ones, too...,
but I'm not the Harvard law professor). That's the issue here, and
that's what the "advertising clause" and similiar clauses evidently
defend against.

Frederick