SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the the-GPL-is-open-to-interpretation dept.
Grsecurity® is an extensive security enhancement to the Linux kernel that defends against a wide range of security threats through intelligent access control, memory corruption-based exploit prevention, and a host of other system hardening that generally require no configuration. It has been actively developed and maintained for the past 14 years. Commercial support for grsecurity is available through Open Source Security, Inc.
In a big red block at the top of their home page is the following warning:
Important Notice Regarding Public Availability of Stable Patches
Due to continued violations by several companies in the embedded industry of grsecurity®'s trademark and registered copyrights, effective September 9th 2015 stable patches of grsecurity will be permanently unavailable to the general public. For more information, read the full announcement.
And I thought GRSecurity was based on the GPL'd work called "Linux". Guess I was wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2015, @03:32PM
Spengler announced he is closing grsecurity, he will only distribute to those who pay him 200 dollars per month
grsecurity is a derivative work of the linux kernel, which has 10000s of rights holders
Spengler only has permission to modify the linux kernel at the grace of those rights holders
either: through bare license (property law), or contract (contract law)
licenses can be revoked at any time by the rights holder, provided he is not estopped from doing so
thus a plaintiff, if linux is merely licensed (if the GPL and agreement is not a contract), can simply bar him and then seek statutory damages if he continues to create derivative works (100k+ per violation)
if the GPL and the agreement which allows Spengler to modify the copyrighted work is a contract, then we proceede under contract law
here first we look to if the document is fully integrated or not, the linux documentation, and the GPL makes no mention of this
but since the linux kernel is under GPL, it's ok to distribute copies of his work for a fee, as long as the source code is published isn't it?
He is not publishing the source code.
He is keeping it closed, except to people who pay 200 a month
since there is no integration clause we can likely bring in extrinsic evidence to show that the rights holders never intended that someone may close a derivative work as such
when a contract is not fully integrated, evidence to the intentions of the parties, their state of mind, usage in trade of terms, etc can be brought in, even if they contradict the written terms of the agreement.
Now, if the GPL is neither a license, and if it also does not satisfy the elements of a contract (perhaps there is no meeting of the minds, or more likely one party has not given anything up), then Spengler is simply violating copyright