Re: Stormy's Update: Week of December 7th

[Michael Meeks <michael meeks novell com>]

Hi Murray,

On Thu, 2009-12-17 at 10:54 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote:
> My concern is that code without a copyright holder cannot really be
> under any license. 

	This is a very frequently made point; of course - IANAL. But if you
follow this argument to it's logical conclusion this makes all of Xorg,
gtk+, GNOME, Linux, Mozilla, Busybox, indefensible. If this were true:
any form of license would be pretty pointless without aggregate
ownership - right ?

> For instance, nobody could go to court to defend
> abuse of LGPL code in Clutter:
> http://git.clutter-project.org/cgit.cgi?url=clutter/tree/COPYING
> if nobody owns the copyright in that code.

	Sure, but of course - someone wrote the code once, and thus owns the
copyright on at least some piece of it.
	
	Busybox's lack of assignment (it appears) hasn't appeared to stop the
SFLC chasing GPL violators, sometimes a dozen at a time ;-)

http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2009/dec/14/busybox-gpl-lawsuit/

	HTH,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael meeks novell com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot