[clug] sec: unclassified - Samba Team, on SCO and sweet irony

[Darren Freeman]

On Fri, 2003-08-22 at 12:33, Pearl Louis wrote:
> The GPL is the contract between the copyright holders of Samba and SCO.  What 
> SCO is saying is that the contract they agreed to that gave SCO permission to 
> use the intellectual property of the Samba people (under the conditions 
> outlined by the contract ie. the GPL) has no real legal status.   Let us

That's an interesting point.

Quoth the GPL v2 June 1991:
--------8<--------8<--------8<--------
You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed
it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute
the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law
if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or
distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you
indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and
conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works
based on it.
--------8<--------8<--------8<--------

So what I'm wondering is this: how can SCO simultaneously accept this
license to distribute SAMBA and also publicly claim it to be unlawful?

Doesn't the mere act of publicly claiming the GPL to be unlawful make it
unlawful (or impossible) to accept it? Surely you could argue that as
SCO publicly states that it doesn't accept the GPL, it is violating
copyright law at this very minute by distributing SAMBA (and I presume a
few other things).

So, do we got em? The FSF and SAMBA team should deliver SCO a
cease-and-decist notice and see what happens. They won't be happy not
being allowed to distribute SAMBA I suspect.

Darren