Did they?
I think one must test GPL in court finally. Even these BeOS actions
(taking a driver and dropping it after threatened) is *not* ok. You
can't get out of a copyright violation lawsuit by not violating it in
the future - you already have violated it, and that's it. With a piece
of GPL code it means: publish all your code of the derivate under GPL.
Copyright is something you must actively protect - if you let things go
loose, a court might decide that you didn't mean the license as written.
If we are not willing to protect our IP, we don't own it. That's the
law. And for damage: yes, we are damaged. After all, the GPL (and FSF's
copyright transfer policy, too) allows the original copyright holder (as
a whole) to sell proprietary derivatives of their own work. The damage
is what the violating company got for their proprietary derivative -
that's the potential price the copyright holders could have made from
their work.
If companies like Novell or BeOS or the iToaster here violate the GPL
and then - after being informed they did so - just claim that there
really wasn't GPL'd code in their product ("we cleanroomed everything"),
it's really time to sue. How can we know without having seen the code
(embedded e-mail addresses in the binary left aside)?
-- Bernd Paysan
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