Re: Re: GPL/LGPL

Hi Brian,

As long as you have all the copyrights (or have cleared them with the
copyright holders), you are of course allowed to distribute the code
under any license you like. So if these files are written by you, I see
no problems at all.

I'm sorry if I might have sounded a bit harsh, but for a moment I was
worrying if some of the code I had written was being "dual-licensed"
without my permission. That would have made me really angry.

As for your "license termination" against Dave: This is not that easy
with the GPL and LGPL license, as you would have known if you had asked
a copyright lawyer who know these licenses. It is, however, quite easy
to force somebody to adhere to the terms of the GPL or LGPL under the
copyright law of almost all countries in the world.

Your requirement that the relevant license texts are distributed with
your code is IMHO fair and reasonable.

Dave, instead of completely stopping to distribute LiS, as I can see
you have done, please add the texts of the LGPL and GPL to the root of
the LiS distribution. If you do this, nothing is stopping you from
adding files from other projects released under the LGPL or GPL (with
due credit, of course). If in doubt, please send me a private mail and
I'll explain the legal implications.

Best Regards,

Ole Husgaard.

Brian F. G. Bidulock wrote:
> Ole,
> 
> Please see responses to your comments inline...
> 
> On Sat, 02 Dec 2006, Ole Husgaard wrote:
> 
> 
>>Hi,
>>
>>Brian F. G. Bidulock wrote:
>>
>>>Regardless of whether your modified sources are considered simple
>>>aggregation (which they cannot), your fundamental gpl-violation is that
>>>you did not include a copy of the license per Section 1 of the GPL.
>>>Thus your distribution is in violation of the GPL, and your attempt to
>>>distribute the files without a copy of the license means that, for you,
>>>the license is void and terminates.  Anyone else that has redistributed
>>>LiS-2.18.0 from your site without including the license, such as Steve,
>>>is also in fundamental violation of the GPL and the license to these
>>>files was void and terminated.  As we follow a dual-licensing model,
>>>punitive damages may have resulted from these gpl violations.  For more
>>>information, see http://www.gpl-violations.org/
>>
>>I am the owner of the copyrights in the contributions I have done to
>>LiS. Some of these contributions are released under the GPL, and some
>>are released under the LGPL.
>>
>>I have never given you permission to relicense or redistribute these
>>works under any other license terms than the GPL respective the LGPL.
>>
>>Therefore, I would like you to explain your remark above about dual-
>>licensing this code. I really hope I am misunderstanding something.
> 
> 
> I was referring to code that I have authored, released under GPL, and
> that was included in the LiS distribution.  Not your code.
> 
> Take a look at http://www.gpl-violations.org/ if you are interested to
> see some of the ramifications of a dual-license model on GPL violations.
> 
> 
>>>>  At 04:48 PM 8/30/2006, Brian F. G. Bidulock wrote:
>>>>
>>>>    Dave,
>>
>>[snip]
>>
>>>>    ./include/sys/tihdr.h
>>>>    ./include/sys/timod.h
>>
>>[snip]
>>
>>>>    Your license to copy and distribute these files is revoked.  Please
>>>>    remove them from your website.
>>
>>I wrote the two files not snipped from the list above last millenium,
>>and contributed them to LiS under the LGPL license. Please explain your
>>right to prohibit others from redistributing them under the LGPL license.
> 
> 
> You should look at the files.  The files you wrote were replaced by
> files of the same name written by me.
> 
> Yes, LiS originally contained some of the files from your (ancient) xti
> package.  That package didn't work well, was not thread safe, the timod
> crashed kernels and was not to spec.  So I rewrote the whole thing from
> scratch, including those two replacement header files.  Parts of it was
> released under LGPL (the libxnet XTI library) and parts under GPL (the
> timod and tirdwr modules and the inet driver).  The problem here is that
> my GPL'ed parts were (are) distributed (instead of your files) in the
> package without including a copy of the (GPL) license, constituting a
> basic GPL violation.
> 
> Others were going further to claim that these LiS distributions were
> all-LGPL, which was incorrect at best.  Not wanting to speak for you (as
> there are some GPL components of yours in the distribution), I was only
> speaking to my GPL components in the distribution.  Your welcome to
> complain about yours as well: you have several GPL components in the LiS
> distributions that are distributed in violation of the GPL too (the
> distribution does not contain a copy of the GPL license).
> 
> Dave removed his and that was that.  However, there are several other
> distributions and redistributions of LiS (from Intel/Dialogic,
> Hewlett-Packard, Wanware, IBM and others) that are likely equally in
> violation.
> 
> But it might be moot: Linux Fast-STREAMS is far superior to LiS in
> conformance, performance, production stability, and production kernel
> support.  LiS pales so much by comparison, it can only be considered
> deprecated.
> 
> If anyone distributing LiS is concerned, OpenSS7 will offer blanket
> licence to redistribute unmodified these files to which it has rights
> in exchange for a meager sponsorship of the OpenSS7 open source project.
> You'll get the latest and greatest Linux Fast-STREAMS too.
> 
> --brian
>