freebsd should be rewritten based on microkernel architecture

[Aryeh Friedman]

On Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 7:44 PM Kevin P. Neal <kpn at neutralgood.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 09:31:30AM -0400, Aryeh Friedman wrote:
> > Thus I suspect if push came to shove in a legal fight about the legality
> of
> > GPL forcing third parties that just happen to use a GPL'ed project to
> give
> > up all claims over how their work is used would likely unconstitutional.
>
> US courts generally prefer to make narrower decisions, and if a case can
> be settled without answering constitutional questions then that's probably
> what the court would do. I seriously doubt a court would say anything at
> all about the constitutionality of the GPL.
>

Of course they would likely use normal copyright law but the constitution
is why IP law is federal but contract law is state.


> > FSF knows this and that is why they highly recommends you to assign all
> > intellectual property rights to FSF and/or the original author.
> > https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#AssignCopyright
>
> I'm not going to waste time on that page. I'll just throw this in:
>
> One can only fight in court if one has "standing". The FSF has no standing
> to fight in court over violations of the license on code that, for example,
> I wrote. To establish standing the FSF needs something like holding the
> rights themselves.


There standing is obvious if the agreement is found to be null and void in
one case then it is likely weaken any claims any other user of the license
makes (including FSF) thus if it was a class action suit then it is more
then certain they would be included in the injured class.   Also since the
license it self is copyrighted by FSF any violations of it would be
copyright infringement on the license it self (since the license is
required to be included with any code you right).   So showing standing is
trivial.

If you had read the page that you purposely skipped you would see they make
roughly the same argument and even though a federal judge interpreting
state law declared in a non-UCC state that GPL was a contract they also
said that FSF had defacto standing in all cases involving GPL.
https://perens.com/2017/05/28/understanding-the-gpl-is-a-contract-court-case/