Re: SFLC's GPL court enforcement -- track record

[David Kastrup]

Alexander Terekhov <terekhov@web.de> writes:

> David Kastrup wrote:
> [...]
>> So what reasons do you assume for the many GPL cases that get settled
>> out of court for defendants with big pockets and plaintiffs with small
>> ones?
>
> The notion of suing people to force them to publish original or even 
> modified source with no commercial value is rather pointless from 
> defendants perspective, since the source is so readily available from 
> others.

Pointless?  If they win in court, they have to pay neither court nor
lawyer costs.  And if the publishing is no big deal, why would they need
to get sued before bothering about compliance?

> And so defendants simply don't bother to fight and prefer to settle
> agreeing to provide one more mirror.

They could have done that before they started paying lawyers.

> If, on the other hand, Moglen & Co ever dares to sue (based on his
> utterly insane "complete source code" and "derived work" theories)
> forcing to GPL the code with some not insignificant commercial value,

Uh, like code for commercially viable routers?

> the GPL'd code base will end up in quasi public domain rather quickly.

Well, chalk that one off to your remarkably consistent track of wrong
predictions.  It only somewhat suffers from being wrong in _hindsight_
already.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum