AbiWord: can someone send a _legal_ advisory?

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Thu, Mar 07, 2002 at 04:31:24PM +0000, Rui Miguel Silva Seabra wrote:
> http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/02/Mar/0106.html
> |
> +- http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/02/Mar/0108.html
> 
> Eben Moglen would be perfect, but if he's (likely) too busy right now,
> can someone else help?

You pointed to the FAQ and problably to my post to this list.
The next people to act are the copyright holders of link or abiword.
Then there is public awareness.

In general:

The place to officially ask for GNU GPL licensing problems is the FSF.
I assume that Dom Lachowicz is located in the US, they know best.

There is a page about when you see licensing violations, 
which also explains the next important steps.
	http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.html

| If there seems to be a real violation, the next thing you need to do
| is record the details carefully.

| Once you have collected the details, you should send a precise
| report to the copyright holder of the packages that are being
| misused. The copyright holder is the one who is legally authorized
| to take action to enforce the license.

Ask questions to gnu at gnu.org.


In this special case:

I do not know much about the people behind Abiword.
If somebody is distributing Abiword with this non-free plug-in,
they are probably violating their license.

Anybody how thinks that this plug-in is non-free does not have a
licence to redistribute or use this software (Abiword + plug-in).
This has practical implications:

It will not make it into Debian or and other GNU/Linux distribution,
like RedHat or Mandrake by default. 

This will probably damage the image of Abiword, resulting in less
people for development and users because of doubts of Abiwords status.

You should politely point this out to the copyright holders and other
developers of abiword. Mr. Lachowicz might slap the license on this,
but other people will not legally be able to use his code without a
proper license.

	Bernhard
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