a public relations opportunity for BSD

[Terry Lambert]

Colin Percival wrote:
> At 23:32 15/05/2003 -0700, Terry Lambert wrote:
> >If you can buy a copy of the SCO Linux product before it's
> >no longer available, do it: the legal theory that made them
> >withdraw the offer for sale of the product was that their
> >sale of it under the GPL granted royalty free license to
> >use their IP contained therein with no royalty, in perpetuity.
> 
>    I'm not aware of any legal theory which makes it possible to grant
> someone a license by mistake.

Who said anything about "by mistake"?  If you release under
a particular license, it's on purpose.


> Providing that someone from SCO stands up in
> court and says "as soon as we realized that our proprietary code had been
> inserted into the linux project we were distributing, we stopped
> distributing it", I think any reasonable court would rule that their code
> had not been licensed under the GPL.

Works only if they terminate the already outstanding licenses:
Ex Post Facto.

-- Terry