Re: One unclear point in the Vim license
Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> writes:
> Henning said this as well, but I guess it bothers me a little bit that
> the GPL prohibits this sort of sane, reasonable, and harmless activity.
> While I may trust the FSF not to sue me for helping a friend out by
> scp'ing various GNU/Linux binaries to him upon request, to help
> troubleshoot his own GNU/Linux system, it bothers me that such an
> activity is considered infringing at all.
I don't think it really prohibits it. If the offer to provide source
is genuine, or if the recipient of the binary really does have the
source already, then it isn't that really important that the recipient
has denied it.
> RMS, can this subject be explored in more depth for GPL v3? I realize
> that any effort to craft a loophole to permit the above scenario will
> see extremely aggressive "legal reading" and exploitation attempts by
> propriteers, and Henning Makholm came up with a very legitimate scenario
> of abuse, but I'd like to think that it is possible to make the behvaior
> described non-infringing without permitting other behaviors that are
> substantively damaging to Free Software.
I think it would be nice if such a "fix" could be made to clarify
things, if it can be done without opening any loopholes. If that's
not possible, however, I don't think we need to fret much.
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