Re: Your petition to GPL Qt
Kevin Forge writes:
> Maybe they do it because the many high priced lawyers they have told them
> a complaint would be laughed out of court ?
Sun and BSDI make and ship their own CD's. Nobody pulls Solaris off the
net and presses CD's from it, and nobody relies on Sun to supply them with
a completely free OS. It either company received a nastygram from the
author of one of the subject programs they would simply pull it from the
distribution and go on. The expense would be at most the destruction of a
few thousand CD's (that's the most the author could expect to win in
court). Their customers would be angry with the author, not Sun.
Debian's CD vendors are different. Pressing CD's is their only business,
and they do it on razor thin margins. They cannot afford to risk having to
destroy thousands of CD's because someone is threatening to sue, nor can
they afford the legal expense of fighting such a suit. There are other
distributions. If they thought Debian was likely to get them into
copyright trouble they would drop Debian. Our users are also different.
They rely on us to supply them with a completely free OS. If they found
that something we told them was free wasn't, they would be angry with us,
not the author. And unlike Solaris or BSDI users, they can easily switch
to a different distribution.
> Besides. They have all been in contact with OSS/FreeSoftware bigwigs at
> various times without this becoming an issue ?
And perhaps they have special permission from the authors. These are
private companies. We have no way to know what private arrangements they
may have made or what their internal decision making processes are.
> Anybody remembers who ships XEMacs ?
Just about everybody, including Debian. Why?
--
John Hasler This posting is in the public domain.
john@dhh.gt.org Do with it what you will.
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