Re: Dangerous back door in the LGPL

On Tue, 4 Jun 2002, Matt Seitz wrote:

> --- Steve Langasek <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On Fri, May 31, 2002 at 05:32:47PM -0700, Matt Seitz wrote:
> > > OK, suppose the FSF suddenly does get bought by Microsoft*.  There are
> > > essentially 2 things that can happen:
> >
> > > 1.  A new, more restrictive license is issued.  As an extreme example, say
> > the
> > > new license is that only Microsoft can distribute the code.
> >
> > > This would have no effect, since each user can choose to ignore the later
> > > version.
> >
> > On the contrary, this is a problem because many people who choose copyleft
> > licenses want to prevent anyone from receiving preferential treatment.
>
> I think I see your point.  If Microsoft bought the FSF, what could happen is:
> 1.  The FSF issues LGPL 3, which says "Only Microsoft can distribute this
> work".
> 2.  Microsoft distributes MS-WINE under LGPL 3.  Microsoft does not have to
> distribute source, and no one but Microsoft can distribute MS-WINE or any
> derivative work.

This does not prevent others from redistributing Wine under the terms of
the LGPL 2.1 unless they also modified the COPYING.LIB file in the Wine
sources that says 'under the terms of the [...] version 2.1 of the
License, or...'.

But it can give them extra privileges: they can write an LGPL v3 which
gives them special privileges and make use of the above 'or...' to take
advantage of them.

--
Francois Gouget         [email protected]        http://fgouget.free.fr/
The nice thing about meditation is that it makes doing nothing quite respectable
                                  -- Paul Dean