GPL-BSD stoush: de Raadt hints at legal action

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 13 September 2007 22:15

Opinion and Analysis

De Raadt also contends that the work done by Kossifidis is not sufficient for him to claim copyright.

"Behind the scenes, we have also looked very closely at the work by Nick and Jiri using their repositories, and have found that most positively Jiri did not write any changes that are valid for copyright...

"Nick's changes are minorly more functional in nature, but once again almost clearly not valid for placing a copyright on a work done primarily by another author - that being Reyk.  Reyk's work was
already a fully functional driver implimentation (sic), and Nick's work are (sic) an adaptation.  This does not give him the right to assert Copyright."

And earlier on in his comments, he asserted: "People in the Linux community are being told they can slap a copyright onto files; they cannot without doing sufficient original work.

"If Reyk sues in Germany, the court's decision applies in the entire world. Especially since the two infringing authors live in Greece and the Czech Republic. (Since they are in the European Union, it is
definately criminal law with penalties).

"US law is very different, but it does not matter at all. The SFLC has made a serious mistake advising foreigners about the law. In fact, there is someone looking into the question of whether Eben has
violated his Bar association agreements by doing so."

De Raadt said that in this case "functional and original source code under one person's copyright was editorially marked up to make it run on another operating system (basically no functional changes; only a few small bugs fixed on the way). And then another licence was wrapped around the whole file. That's not legal.

"That would be a derivatative (sic) work *ONLY* if it has original work, and adaptation is legally not original work. They are on very shaky ground indeed."