Re: GPLv3 Position Statement

Linus Torvalds
2006-09-29T18:28:29Z

On Fri, 29 Sep 2006, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> thats the interpretation that has been accepted several times in out of
> court GPL violation settlements.

I think you can push that angle, and a lot of the time it will work in
practice - because the companies involved are really not "evil", and most
often they simply want to avoid any trouble.

At the same time, in many cases the settlements seem to be very much about
real issues, like not actually following the GPLv2 (giving no credit, not
mentioning the license, not making sources available). Rather than about
any imagined or real lock-down issues.

There's certainly a _correlation_ between "locking down" and "being sleazy
in general", but I don't think it's necessarily a causal relationship.

Linus