[oclug] Canadian LUGs and SCO

[Robert Brockway]

On Sat, 26 Jul 2003, Brad Barnett wrote:

> You're not catching on though Rod.  You can not be *tricked* into breaking
> *any* law, and then held liable, if you had reasonable cause to believe
> what you were doing is quite legal and legitimate.  Linux's reputation is

Yes, this is the concept known as "acting in good faith".  If you make an
action believing that doing so is right and lawful you can be protected
from subsequent prosecution if you can show you were acting in good faith
(basically you really thought the action was correct in the circumstances
and you had no way of knowing otherwise).

There is also a concept known as "honest mistake of fact" which can also
be an excuse for having committed an offence.  There are documented cases
of person A driving the car of person B away from a car park because the
cars owned by A & B were parked close by, the same model and colour and
the keys fitted (not that unlikely actually).  As person A made an honest
mistake of fact s/he cannot be charged with a criminal offence for having
stolen a car.  Note though, that it is up to the A to show on the balance
of probabilities that they didn't realise the car wasn't theirs.  They
could show for example, that it was the end of a long work day and they
were tired and not paying attention to minor details about the interior of
the car.

Btw, IANAL so seek legal advise before raising defences like honest
mistake of fact.

> enough (up until this point) to show that anyone using it had the firm
> belief that it was GPL pure.

The kernel even claims to be GPL pure:

zen:/proc$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/tainted
0

If you see a "1" there then some part of the kernel is not under the GPL
or a compatible licence.  That part of the code (usually a module) does
need to set the tained bit of course.

Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org  ICQ: 104781119
Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah