[Richard Sharpe <rsharpe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 12 Apr 2004, Ronnie Sahlberg wrote:

> Clause 4 of the GPL talks about when you violate the GPL your right to use
> the software and your licence is revoked.
> Interestingly enough there is nothing I could find that specifies how a
> licence can be reaquired after it once has been terminated.
> Perhaps a termination of licence to use the GPL software is permanent and
> can not be regranted?  Too bad.
 
Hmmm, but the FSF seems to contact lots of organizations with a view to 
bringing them back into compliance ...
 
> Should we add new updated GPL licence boilerplates that clarifies :
>    This licence applies to all users that adhere to the licence and respects
> it.
>    People/Company X is not covered by this licence since they have had it
> terminated by deliberately violating the GPL.
>    Thus People/Company X may not even use this software for internal/private
> use.   Sorry.
>    Any use or redistribution of this software by People/Company X is
> unlicenced and illegal.
> 
> Then we can have a file in the distribution that lists all people/companies
> that have had their licence revoked and thus can no longer
> use the software in any form.
> 
> 
> I read the GPL as that there is no way to regrant a licence after it has
> once been terminated for a certain party.
> This would mean that this file would be append-only since no one would ever
> be removed from it.
> Question then is  should we only add companies to this list or should we
> also add the employees of that companie (as many of them as we can find
> out?)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Richard Sharpe"
> Sent: Monday, April 12, 2004 8:45 AM
> Subject: Re: [Ethereal-dev] ClearSight/GPL update
> 
> 
> > On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> >
> > > On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, Guy Harris wrote:
> > >
> > > > On Sun, Apr 11, 2004 at 02:58:58PM -0700, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> > > > > In addition, whether or not OLE serves to sufficiently distance
> Ethereal
> > > > > from the ClearSight product depends on the implementation technique.
> If it
> > > > > uses any form of dynamic linking, then I think they still have a
> problem
> > > > > with theirs being a derived work. However, I am not familiar enough
> with
> > > > > OLE to be able to say.
> > > >
> > > > The impression I have is that an OLE server (Ethereal is presumably
> > > > acting as an OLE server) can either be "in-process", in which case
> it's
> > > > a DLL and requests from the client to the server are done by loading
> the
> > > > DLL if it's not already loaded and calling code in the DLL, or
> > > > "out-of-process", in which case it's a separate executable and some
> > > > interprocess message channel is used to convey the request and the
> > > > results.
> > >
> > > This is interesting.
> > >
> > > > If it's in-process, that's a form of dynamic linking; I'd say only
> > > > software with a GPL-compatible license could use a GPL'ed in-process
> > > > server.
> > >
> > > I would tend to agree with this.
> > >
> > > > If it's out-of-process, you could probably argue that the connection
> > > > between the client and server doesn't require that a GPL'ed
> > > > out-of-process server be used only by clients with GPL-compatible
> > > > licenses.
> > >
> > > I would tend to agree with this. If this is the case, ClearSight could
> > > make their case that they are not a derived work stronger by making
> other
> > > packet capture and analysis engines for Windows work with their product.
> >
> > It should be noted that simply re-implementing to cross some artificial
> > barrier to try to avoid copyright law, is not sufficient, as far as I
> > understand these things.
> >
> > That is, if they were a derived work before they changed the interface,
> > and their only reason for changing the interface was to try to avoid the
> > provisions of the copyright law, I think they are still violating our
> > licence.
> >
> > We need to have competent advice on these issues.
> >
> > I am copying this discussion to another list where we might get some
> > answers.
> >
> > Regards
> > -----
> > Richard Sharpe, rsharpe[at]richardsharpe.com, rsharpe[at]samba.org,
> > sharpe[at]ethereal.com, http://www.richardsharpe.com
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ethereal-dev mailing list
> > Ethereal-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> > http://www.ethereal.com/mailman/listinfo/ethereal-dev
> 
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> 

-- 
Regards
-----
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe[at]richardsharpe.com, rsharpe[at]samba.org, 
sharpe[at]ethereal.com, http://www.richardsharpe.com