[vlc-devel] STOP! Think. Act... (was Re: Formal complaint -censorship)

[salsaman]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 2:37 PM, Yuval Levy <vlc07 at sfina.com> wrote:
> I did not want to chime in again, letting the vlc-developers heal their wound,
> apologize to each other, understand each other's view and reaching a
> consensus, but this is not only obnoxious, it is also wrong and stands
> corrected:
>
> On October 27, 2010 06:03:06 am salsaman wrote:
>> 1) If you (vlc team) turn a blind eye to what Apple are doing, then
>> don't be surprised if, some time in the future, some other company
>> puts out a closed source version of VLC. When you complain, they can
>> then (quite rightly) point out the fact that you allow Apple to
>> distribute VLC under terms which are incompatible with the GPL.
>
> You are right that from a practical perspective being seen as aggressively
> enforcing your copyright may help dissuade others.
>
> But you stand corrected from a legal perspective.  A copyright holder has the
> prerogative to license their work under different and even conflicting licenses
> on a case by case basis with no prejudice.  The only potential future
> prejudice is if you turn a blind eye on one case of potential infringement you
> learn about now and change your mind in the future.
>

I was speaking from a moral perspective there, not a legal one.

>
>> 2) It seems that this issue is gathering more publicity, and many see
>> it as an opportunity to open dialog with Apple to persuade them to
>> change their licensing policy for GPL applications. If you have
>> contacts there, please remind them that what they are doing
>> (relicensing GPL code under another license) is actually illegal
>
> Not a nice way to open dialog.  But then, I have not seen nice things from you
> in this thread.
>

I am sorry about that. But this thread was the first place that I
learned about this situation, and on first reading it appeared that
the vlc "managers" (whoever they are) were simply ignoring the wishes
of developers and going ahead with relicensing the VLC code via the
Appstore. If the situation is different then that was not made clear
initially.

So I apologise if I have misread the situation. I'm generally a nice
person except when riled up :-)

Regards,
Salsaman.



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