He can file a claim against you for breathing. What will hold up in
court is another matter.
Lawyers are paid to nit-pick and look for loopholes. Defense lawyers
are paid to be nervous about other people nit-picking, and pre-emptively
do the nit-picking for you. That said, we're talking civil court here,
not criminal. Civil courts are also jammed solid, but they get to throw
out frivolous lawsuits a lot more easily.
As for the GPL not re-licensing other code, actually it forces the
DISTRIBUTOR to re-license the other code if they want to use it with GPL
code. It does this by refusing to allow itself to be used with any code
that CAN'T be re-licensed in that way. (Convertability to GPL.)
You can't distribute a binary containing GPL code unless you distribute
the source code used to generate that entire binary. ("Complete
product", and yes you could argue about it in court but the potential is
fairly clear.) If the other code cannot be distriuted under a GNU Pubic
License covering the entire body of code (I.E. the other code's license
doesn't prevent it from being re-distributed under the GPL, meaning the
original license is less restrictive in all respects and the additional
GPL restrictions do not conflict with it), then the other code CANNOT be
used with the GPL code to create a legally distributable binary, or
distributed together with GPL code for the obvious purpose of creating a
binary. Period.
A license covers code AS DISTRIBUTED. You can get the exact same code
under a different license from a different source (which is actually
what Reiser is offering). So if the BSD license were covertable to GPL
(whole 'nother can of worms there), I could give you a copy of a BSD
variant which -I- have placed under the GPL. If you don't want to be
entangled by the GPL, you can get the same code from elsewhere under a
different license, and would be stupid to use the one I gave you.
Thus his "additional restriction" -IS MEANINGLESS-, certainly with
regard to the intent of the license (which is pretty darn important in
court most of the time). The GPL already contains it.
You could make the same argument about linking straight GPL code against
the linux kernel, which is licensed under the GPL with one exception (a
relaxation that allows non-gpl binaries to be linked to it as kernel
modules, or runnable programs). That's a long-settled issue, and even
the guy who created the GPL (Richard Stallman, and yes he hired one or
more lawyers in the process) agrees it all works together.
Cases won on technicalities that go against the clearly expressed intent
may get most of the press coverage, and in criminal court where the
constitutional presumption of innocence favors the defendant they may
occasionally be enforceable. But we're talking civil court here. What
are the damages you can show? They have this tendency to go through a
six month trial for people who really insist and then award a total
remedy of $1 damage if you try to push a technicality on them. And this
is assuming you have an enforceable technicality, which I still don't
see here.
Reiser should still clean up his wording so his intent is more clearly
expressed. I doubt his code will be distributed with the mainline
kernel until then. But as for causing actual enforceable problems, I
just don't see it.
Rob
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