[jdom-interest] Imcompatibility with GPL

[Elliotte Harold]

Jason Hunter wrote:

> An FSF lawyer posting that organization's postion is nice but doesn't 
> resolve the issue.  Based on my understanding of how the legal system 
> works, the lawyer who writes a license doesn't have special rights to 
> interpret the license text.
 >
> (Although an organization's statement concerning the license for their 
> own intellectual property may be used as evidence in a lawsuit.)

The first paragraph sort the second. The statements of an organization's 
official spokesperson certainly do carry more weight than the statement 
of you or me.

Of course, it's a problem that the law, unlike code, most be interpreted 
by human beings; and you can never be certain what any judge might do on 
the wrong day. However that applies to *ALL* licenses: GPL. LGPL, 
Apache, shrinkwrap, etc. If that possibility really bothers you so much, 
then you can't release software under a license at all. In fact, you 
probably can't do business, since contracts are subject to judicial whim 
as well. We have to the best we can, and move forward.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo at metalab.unc.edu
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
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