Comment Re:Amazing (Score 1) 919
There is nothing in the GPL that equates "comunity" and "the world as a whole". There is no default community that is entitled to anything. Once you distribute software to somebody, then they are brought into your "community". Neither you nor they are obligated to give anything to Torvalds or Stallman, only the sources to what you already provided the community you created.
Now that doesn't explicitly exclude them either - any party in your community can later decide to give (sell) this software to Stallman, which would then bring Stallman into their newly formed "community". This would cause no further obligations on you towards Stallman, but they would be obligated to offer Stallman for 3 years, the source to what they gave him - regardless of whether they originally got it from you.
Corporate policy should be able to limit your subsidiaries from then practically bringing unwanted members into any community with access to your in house software.
Perhaps as a precondition to any divesting of these subsidiaries, they could be required to stop using this software - not as per the GPL, but as a condition of the spin-off or take-over. Even if not, there is no requirement to give them the source, only to formally offer it for 3 years. So then the company must remain fully in your control until the term has passed.
The GPL was intended to be comprehensible by the General Public, so as to be useable as the General Public('s) License. All in all, other than a less legal than technical points, it has done a pretty good job of that. In this case, it sounds almost as if your lawyers were going more by misunderstood gossip than by the letter of the license, which IMO keeps a fair approximation of the spirit of the license.
Of course, I'm no lawyer. But I am a member of the General Public, and I present this official opinion as a member of the General Public. I futher acknowledge that in fact and in deed, GNU is Not UNIX. (But it might be Unix.)
Now that doesn't explicitly exclude them either - any party in your community can later decide to give (sell) this software to Stallman, which would then bring Stallman into their newly formed "community". This would cause no further obligations on you towards Stallman, but they would be obligated to offer Stallman for 3 years, the source to what they gave him - regardless of whether they originally got it from you.
Corporate policy should be able to limit your subsidiaries from then practically bringing unwanted members into any community with access to your in house software.
Perhaps as a precondition to any divesting of these subsidiaries, they could be required to stop using this software - not as per the GPL, but as a condition of the spin-off or take-over. Even if not, there is no requirement to give them the source, only to formally offer it for 3 years. So then the company must remain fully in your control until the term has passed.
The GPL was intended to be comprehensible by the General Public, so as to be useable as the General Public('s) License. All in all, other than a less legal than technical points, it has done a pretty good job of that. In this case, it sounds almost as if your lawyers were going more by misunderstood gossip than by the letter of the license, which IMO keeps a fair approximation of the spirit of the license.
Of course, I'm no lawyer. But I am a member of the General Public, and I present this official opinion as a member of the General Public. I futher acknowledge that in fact and in deed, GNU is Not UNIX. (But it might be Unix.)
