Re: Inconsistencies in our approach
On Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 01:29:12PM -0400, Brian T. Sniffen wrote:
> I wish to address a very narrow part of this point: because copyright
> protects only creative expression of ideas, and because legal
> terminology is intended to be strictly denotative and carefully
> defined, contracts and similar legal texts (including licenses)
> receive very weak copyright protection; often none.
But the GPL itself starts with:
| GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
| Version 2, June 1991
|
| Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
| 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
| Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
| of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
And while you may debate the enforcability of this in the US, it may be
enforcable elsewhere, and our preference has always been to assume licenses
are enforcable as written.
Now, given that a huge portion of our software ships with this, and it is
incorporated in our .debs by reference (and by mandate in the GPL itself),
considering the text of the GPL to be non-free would force the removal of
most of main directly or because of dependencies.
If you then grant the GPL an exception, why do you not do that for RFCs?
Why do you not do that for the Emacs manual? What is special about the GPL?
This is what bothers me the most. We must not play favorites or say "Well,
this non-free file goes in main because it's too important to have in
non-free". Either it is free or not, and popularity has nothing to do with
that.
To put it more concretely: I have not seen any arguments that argue against
the removal of RFCs on the grounds that they are non-free software that do
not also argue against the removal of the GPL. Can someone devise one?
> boilerplate: there's no other way to express exactly the same idea, so
> the expression receives no copyright protection. As a result, I
> suggest you abandon this point of your argument.
But you need only look at the first few lines of the GPL to see what I'm
talking about; the FSF actually asserts copyright over it.
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