Yet another article found at Groklaw. It transpires that Linus, who is famed for his dislike of all things legal, has started digging away in US law. Guess what, he’s turned up something important already.
Fundamentally, the article talks about how copyright law expressly includes ‘the expectation of receipt’ of anything of value, and expressly mentions ‘receipt of other copyrighted works’ as such a thing of value. And that’s the _definition_ of ‘financial gain’ as far as copyright law is concerned.
I think this means that just by receiving Linux, there is a transfer of value. This makes sense as Linux is after all “free” as in speech rather than “free” as in beer.
This tends to make SCO’s attacks at the GPL look weaker, particularly as they make wild claims like it’s un-American or against financial gain.
I’m not gloating, but to me it all seems bad news for SCO at the moment. I am really glad though!