GPL vs BSD Licence

[TM4525 at aol.com]

In a message dated 10/29/04 3:54:44 PM Eastern Daylight Time, chad at shire.net 
writes:
> Its equally "preposterous" for the GPLers to claim that anything that 
> works
> with any O/S is owned by the owner of the OS as a "derivative work". 
> But
> they do, and they will, because it suits them.

>It is not just the GPL folks.  SCO is doing the same thing to IBMs 
>code.  Code totally removed from SCOs SysVR4 code is being claimed by 
>SCO as a derivative work.

>I am not trying to open up a discussion on SCO.  Just to point out that 
>this phenomenon is not restricted to the GPL fanatics.
The whole SCO vs IBM mess is an illustration of just how goofy the entire
GPL is. IBM claims that they have standing to sue over LINUX because they've
made contributions. But since contributions are derivative works, then 
they shouldn't have any copyright. So does everyone who has contributed 
to linux have standing to sue then?

Of course, I think device drivers and modules are different. The entire 
purpose
of the device driver/module interface is to make add-ons possible without
having to modify the kernel. The concept that they are also "derivative works"
is nonsense.