Thank you Mr. Rankin for saying this. Bruce Perens blocked me* (also calling me a "fool" later to a 3rd party) after I started to brainstorm the defenses that would be raised about a week or two ago: letting everyone in the world know what he thought of me for mentioning laches etc.

Such talk is naivete to him and he "doesn't suffer fools willingly".

Brainstorming what defenses the opposition will raise is the thinking of a naive fool according to Bruce Perens.

I also noticed that Bruce Perens friend Professor Moglen hasn't commented, instead opting to sit and silently judge, but I did bring up the fact that GPL v2 lacks a no-revocation clause, thus (barring estopple) said license can be revoked at any time by the grantor. Which is the actual reason v3 of the GPL needed to be drafted (the patents issue being a foil). I guess Professor Moglen (RMS, ESR) and the rest don't want too many people to know about that part either and thus would rather downplay anything else I have written.

To be clear: Rights-Holders can sue GRSecurity for the copyright violation stemming from the flagrant violation of section 6 of the license. Rights-Holders can also revoke GRSecurity's license to their code by notice and then sue them if they continue to make derivative works of said work. So Rights-Holders have two options there at their disposal.

The GPL v2, by itself, does not give rise to an estopple situation where there has been no communication to the other party that they relied upon that the license would never be revoked by Rights-Holder.

The permission flows from the Rights-Holder and not through intermediaries. Thus even if Linus made communications that HE would never revoke the permission he has given regarding his works of authorship, that does not bind other Rights-Holders regarding their code.

*( lists.debian.org/debian-user/2017/07/msg00830.html )

On 2017-07-30 07:14, David C. Rankin wrote:

On 07/30/2017 12:55 AM, David Lang wrote:

...

You are thinking of Trademarks, they must be defended or you loose them. Contracts and Licenses do not need to be defended at every chance or risk loosing them.

No, not always, it can apply in plain contract as well. The defenses that could be later raised by grsecurity if this issue goes unaddressed is are (1) latches; and (2) waiver. It is a slippery slope. While, without commenting on the dubious nature of the current use of the defenses (as catch-all, kitchen-sink affirmative-defenses), they can be expected to be raised if rights under GPL to insure no further restrictions are placed on subsequent use of the kernel-code are not enforced.

I hope there is a centralized forum that will be established for this issue (there may be and I'm just not smart enough to have found it yet). Certainly, if for nothing else, so the advantages and disadvantages of both action, and inaction, can be peer-reviewed on both the legal and technical side.