Re: Black Duck IP Assessment of FreeRDP

On Tue, 21 Jun 2011, Marc-André Moreau wrote:

> Here's what I propose:
> 
> Since none of us are real lawyers, we can go on like this forever. I 
> will work on getting the necessary funding for hiring a real lawyer, who 
> will come in and provide legal advice on the matter.
> 
> Would that be considered a way to resolve the conflict and satisfy both 
> ends?
> 
> I appreciate your concerns for doing things right, but we need to get 
> over this at some point and move on. A lot of energy has already been 
> put onto this.

You must understand that there is no such thing as a universal truth. As 
others have pointed out, different jurisdictions have differens laws, and 
different courts may judge differently. However, we still believe that 
most of them will agree with Otavio:s summary:

"Because even if we remove all code from Cendio from source it will
still be a derivated work."

A real lawyer can provide another opinion, which can certainly be useful, 
especially if he has open source and copyright experience. Perhaps you 
should consider hiring someone from SFLC?

But still, yet another opinion can only lower the uncertainties; it can 
never guarantee that a future trial will come to a different conclusion. 
This means that the legal status of future Apache licensed FreeRDP 
releases would always be somewhat uncertain.

Our business model is to work closely with different free software and 
open source projects, contributing in many ways, and being good open 
source citizens. We believe that GPL, and especially GPLv3, is a very good 
license (http://www.cendio.com/aboutus/press/2007/005.xhtml). I'd like to 
emphasize that we are not interested in taking this to court at this time, 
but of course a future company board may think otherwise. Also we cannot 
speak for the non-Cendio copyright holders which haven't agreed to the 
change.

We do understand that many companies are interested in a FreeRDP release 
without a copyleft license. Companies loves advanced software that they 
can do whatever they want with. But we are arguing that this would be "too 
good to be true": Despite the low activity in the rdesktop project before 
the fork, the software still represents a highly valuable piece of 
software. This is largely because of Matt Chapman and others, but Cendio 
also contributed heavily to it. We did this because the GPL license 
guaranteed copyleft; it guaranteed that no company could use it for profit 
without giving back. This explains why we do not want to switch to a 
non-copyleft license.


Best regards, 
---
Peter Åstrand		ThinLinc Chief Developer
Cendio AB		http://www.cendio.com
Wallenbergs gata 4
583 30 Linköping	Phone: +46-13-21 46 00

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