Re: Linux/Mozilla related Short-Term Contract

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "jb" == Jonathan Q <jq@example.com> writes:

    jb> Stephen J. Turnball (turnbull@example.com) wrote:
    Stephen> No.  It must be distributed, or the clause does not
    Stephen> apply.  If it

    jb> I'm not so sure.  The specific wording is "to anyone to whom
    jb> you made an Executable version available."  It doesn't say
    jb> "anyone who doesn't work for you, or anyone except those you
    jb> made to sign an NDA."  It just says "anyone."

And I just said "to whom it is distributed," now didn't I?  If
e-shuppan sees its improved Mozilla as a competitive advantage if kept
internal to their operations ...

    jb> It's not my intentions that matter, really.  What matters is
    jb> how narrowly AOL interprets that clause of the license, and

... just like AOL (funny you should mention them) sees its webserver
and proprietary version of sendmail, they _can_ profit by keeping it
private and it is _legal_ to do so.  Even rms says so, for the GPL,
and that's for things like web and mail servers.

It so happens that AOL has released its webserver, but I believe their
mail software is still proprietary.

It's unlikely that an individual would do such a thing.  But Hotmail
might and legally could do so, even with GPL software.  And legal
racketeering would cut no ice with them; they'd just come back at AOL
with a countersuit alleging racketeering.

This has been a big problem, eg, for Cygnus, in the past, because they
incautiously signed NDAs without a termination date and then were not
allowed to redistribute generally useful optimizations for gcc because
they were part of a contract for a port to a specific CPU.  Those NDAs
were legal.

The reason for this loophole is that enforcing give-backs of any mods
whether distributed or not would constitute an ethical invasion of
privacy.


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