Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 26 Oct 2018 11:50:01 -0400 | From | "Eric S. Raymond" <> | Subject | Re: The linux devs can rescind their license grant. |
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Eben Moglen <moglen@columbia.edu>: > reputational damage is *specifically* recognized as grounds for relief. > > No. Reputational damage is not mentioned at all, let alone > specifically recognized.
I have no difficulty in finding the word "reputation" in the brief in in proximity with the phrase "increasing [the programmer's] recognition in his profession". In fact the brief notes " The Eleventh Circuit has recognized the economic motives inherent in public licenses, *even where profit is not immediate*" (Emphasis mine.)
And "The attribution and modification transparency requirements directly serve to drive traffic to the open source incubation page and to inform downstream users of the project, which is a significant economic goal of the copyright holder *that the law will enforce.*" (Emphasis mine.)
You seem to be denying that the brief says what it actually says. It not only qualifies reputational gain as a kind of economic gain - and thus losses as damage - but cites the Eleventh Circuit as a previous authority for the proposition, and affirms that these gains and losses can be a matter for the law.
This disinclines me to trust the rest of your analysis or assertions. I think you are advocating for your interest in the perceived irrevocability of the GPL, and where this implies being less than fully forthcoming about the actual risks in *this* situation you are committing something perilously close to suppressio veri. This is not helpful.
I've lived with a practising attorney since about the time she was one of the first-line legal reviewers for the original GPL back in the 1980s - we probably still have the draft printout with her scribbled annotations on it somewhere. "Only lawyers can interpret this voodoo" is not a good line to pull on me when it comes to open-source licensing; I don't buy it and she wouldn't either.
Here's another sentence from the brief that I had forgotten: "Copyright holders who engage in open source licensing have the right to control the modification and distribution of copyrighted material." - a particularly telling sentence in regard to the current controversy, and one I had forgotten.
That there could be enough to win the day for the license revokers - they don't actually have to revoke, just assert that control. Pretty much equivalent to what the the Berne Convention's moral-rights provision does in Europe - they could claim that the CoC is a defacement of their work to which they refuse assent and have a case.
I am not at all doubtful that the dissidents know these things; some of the language in the broadsides to lkml so indicates. Which is why I'm trying to get the kernel leadership to repair its unnecessarily high-handed behavior before somebody gets pissed off enough to actually drop a bomb. -- <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>
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