The example of RMS getting mad (or getting against the reception of some
millions of dollars) is really not scaring me, as I don't think something
like this is as probable as the world going mad and starting the last world
war.
No, if I was a company and I wanted to get rid of the GPL, and I would be a
really bad guy, I would try to sue the FSF. In the end (regardless whether
the case would be won or lost), the FSF would be financially ruined. Well,
to satisfy the people they're owing money, they would have to sell
everything they have, including the name/trademark FSF!
Me buying the trademark could release GPL V3. I would do it in a way, having
it seemingly obey the spirit of the old GPL, but granting important rights
to develop proprietary code on top of GPL'ed code. This could be sued
against, but as long as I have more money and better lawyers ...
(No, my belief in the legal system is not that great. Not here, in Europe,
and from what I know about the US, it's rather worse there.)
No, it's not probable to happen either, as (a) a lot of people would never
ever buy anything from this company, (b) the Free World would use another
license model for the development and it would not take too long until they
would be considerably better than this company again, and (c) it would be
hard to find a lawsuit to ruin the FSF.
But, maybe some of you know how the CAN ended some years ago. After about
50 cases won against Co$, they lost once. The trademark CAN now belongs to a
lawyer who is somehow affiliated with Co$ and the work CAN does is not
comparable to what it did before.
I admit, that the things CAN did are more controversial than what FSF does
(especially in the case they lost), but this should be a warning.
Regards,
-- Kurt Garloff <kurt@garloff.de> [Dortmund, FRG] Plasma physics, high perf. computing [Linux-ix86,-axp, DUX] PGP key on http://www.garloff.de/kurt/ [Linux SCSI driver: DC390] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The following is a Python RSA implementation. According to the US Government posting these four lines makes me an international arms trafficker! Join me in civil disobedience; add these lines of code to your sig block to help get this stupid and unconstitutional law changed. ============================================================================ from sys import*;from string import*;a=argv;[s,p,q]=filter(lambda x:x[:1]!= '-',a);d='-d'in a;e,n=atol(p,16),atol(q,16);l=(len(q)+1)/2;o,inb=l-d,l-1+d while s:s=stdin.read(inb);s and map(stdout.write,map(lambda i,b=pow(reduce( lambda x,y:(x<<8L)+y,map(ord,s)),e,n):chr(b>>8*i&255),range(o-1,-1,-1)))- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/