On Jun 26, 2007, Jan Harkes <jaharkes@cs.cmu.edu> wrote:
Granted, that was just adding insult to the injury ;-)
Assume the sources are kept in the encrypted disk. Or that the
sources are shipped in an encrypted CD, that only the machine itself
can read, using hardware-assisted decryption.
That the whole disk is encrypted is "just a technical detail". And
it's not the media that's encrypted, it's the data in it. Surely both
hard disks and CDs are media customarily used for software
interchange. And there is often compressed and encrypted data and
software in them.
The encrypted partition is not the source code. It contains the
source code. Very much like the computer, or the disk, or the boot
partition, is not the GPLed program, it contains the GPLed program.
That it's encrypted, signed, or hardware-protected, have all been
claimed as reasons why they're outside the scope of the GPL and can be
used to escape its intent in this or other recent threads.
"We don't oppose that you do any of these things, once you get the
source code. We just make it difficult (hopefully impossible) that
you'll get to the source code in the first place."
I don't think a copyright lawsuit can be generally expected to obtain
this result. A court can stop the distributor from distributing in an
infringing manner, but I don't think a court could force the
distributing party to shell out source code. The distributing party
might not even *have* source code in the first place. And even if she
had, she might have no right to distribute it. Or she might not want
to, and then a court *might* require them to do so, but that would be
quite unusual.
--
Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
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