Re: [Fsfe-uk] Sep 27th will be GNU's 25th anniversary

[Alex Hudson]

On Wed, 2008-02-13 at 11:09 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> Had GPL2 been successfully attacked anywhere?

I think I mentioned on this list previously that one London lawyer who
is well-known within the field of FLOSS licensing has a number of
clients effectively bypassing the copyleft of the GPLv2, because he
believes it to be unenforceable in UK law and is advising them as such.

I'm not convinced he's right (insofar as I'm not sure whether a court
would necessarily agree with him), but his argument (based on the
language, not the mechanism per se) sounded pretty convincing when I
last talked to him, and although the GPLv3 hadn't come out by that
point, I'm sure we talked about the drafts as having potentially fixed
the problem.

I rather doubt that GPLv3 will change things in practice in any regard
except for patents - I don't see Tivo-type devices changing any time
soon - but it does seem to be widely agreed that the drafting, while
lengthier, is better quality. 

Cheers,

Alex.