Quote:
Originally Posted by Joshua Nightshade  Presumably LL discovered this hours ago. As you said, they're slow to act. This isn't a crisis of epic proportions necessitating the shutdown of someone's business because they failed to comply with what is, really, not the biggest of deals.
That's why it's overreaching. While I agree that they need to honor the terms of the license, it's for LL to decide if they aren't. Going to lengths like this to disable Sakai's company over something rather petty in the long run is nasty, in my opinion. Especially given the fact that this isn't an emergency.
And I say this as someone who really dislikes Sakai and OLG even less. |
It's not just a small deal looking at OLG's behaviour thus far which has been essentially very sneaky tricks aimed at vendor lockin - one thing which the GPL was designed to prevent.
Legally, it's up to LL or anyone with a patch in the viewer to do something about this, ethically it's up to the whole community to apply pressure. As i've already said, the GPL means absolutely nothing if it isn't enforced. Whether or not you actually believe that the political goals behind the GPL are a good thing (and I suspect most commercial entities only use it to prevent competitors from hiding improvements rather than the original goals) you have to concede it is just as much a matter of copyright as any other license including even the windows EULA.
I'd go so far as to say that distributing a binary of a GPLed app without source is in fact
worse than distributing a pirated copy of windows, since it's a slap in the face to anyone who cares about the freedoms the GPL is designed to protect.
Not to mention that this won't "disable Sakai's company" - it'll result in one server being taken offline until compliance is fixed, hopefully giving Sakai a kick in the backside to sort out this very simple legal matter.