On Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 04:41:54PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote: > 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? > 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? "Licenses and copyright notices merit special treatment because they *are* special: they're the one thing that we include in Debian *not* because of their content value to users, but because they're necessary legal incantations required by copyright law. Freedom to modify a license text does not translate into freedom from distributing the verbatim text of the license governing the works we distribute; and while there are parallels here with RFCs (changing the text of the standard does not change the standard), the key difference is that we can choose not to distribute the RFCs. Technically we /can/ choose not to distribute copyright notices and licenses, but as a pragmatic concession to copyright law, we opt for a non-empty distro instead. ;) "In short, since no one is advocating the distribution of software licenses as OS components per se, they are not subject to the same requirements of content modifiability that govern OS components. The interest in RFCs, and other documentation, clearly lies in their utility as OS components." Message-ID: <20030731201115.GB17219@tennyson.netexpress.net> -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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