Re: Dangerous back door in the LGPL

Matt Seitz <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.emulators.wine.license
Message-ID <[email protected]>
--- Francois Gouget <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Matt Seitz wrote:
> > True, but I assume if Microsoft went to the trouble of buying the FSF,
> issuing
> > an LGPL 3, and creating an MS-WINE version, then they would not be stupid
> > enough to leave such an obvious back door.  They would almost certainly
> ammend
> > COPYING.LIB so that the distribution terms for MS-WINE would be LGPL 3
> only.
> 
> But they cannot do that. If they could, they could also edit it right
> now to put any license they want.

They cannot do that today, because Microsoft is not the FSF.  But if Microsoft
controlled the FSF, then they could.

> The only way to legally modify COPYING.LIB is with the agreement of all
> the copyright holders. 

No, the only way to legally copy COPYING.LIB (or a work derived from
COPYING.LIB) is with the agreement of all copyright holders.  Microsoft could
simply replace COPYING.LIB with their own license stateme

=====
Sincerely,
Matt Seitz

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