Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations

[Martin Langhoff]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 10:53 PM, John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:
> The last suggestion I heard from OLPC along these lines was that the

We had a _private_ conversation in which I carefully said that I was
_not_ speaking for OLPC, and had no say or authority over laptop
stuff. I look after the server and we both agreed that the server does
the right thing at every corner.

I am surprised that you'd misrepresent that private discussion in this way.

To clarify for the rest of list, I mentioned in a much wider
discussion that from my legal training in software licensing (2
papers, masters level) I observed that I suspect (but do now know fora
fact) that in deployment countries kids are _not_ allowed to sell the
laptops for profit while they are in school, so perhaps they don't own
them in the legal sense until they finish school.

Kids have the laptops to themselves in a practical everyday sense,
they take them home and use them freely. But the fact that the school
restricts their sale (and other things, like, oh, removing the sw that
makes them useful in school) hints at where the legal ownership
resides.

Again -- this is my personal understanding. I don't speak for OLPC in
these matters, and I am _not_ a lawyer. My _personal_ suspicion is
that GPLv3 doesn't have a strong anti-tivolisation case here, ask a
competent lawyer.

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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