Re: Inconsistencies in our approach
John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> writes:
> 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.
Indeed. And elsewhere, the FSF grants a license to create derivative
works of the GPL: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL.
It's also been Debian's preference to read all the applicable
licenses. Particularly because it's a license, it's important to
distinguish between changing an instance of it and creating a new
license derivative of the GPL.
> 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.
Not quite. I *do* think Debian should remove the GPL's
Invariant-but-removable Preamble, distributing only the legal text.
The FSF says
<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOmitPreamble>, but since
the requirement for future distribution is only "under the terms of
the GPL," Debian could distribute the "Debian GPL" containing only the
legal terms, and without the invariant Preamble.
> 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.
Are you constructing straw men? I have seen nobody argue that the GPL
is popular, and so should be retained. Indeed, I've seen proponents
of non-modifiable-RFCs-in-main arguing that they're so popular that it
would un-Social to remove them. Can you cite such a message?
> 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?
Well, there's the easy approach, pointing to
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL. Look, the terms
of the GPL are free.
But if you'd like a more complicated answer, sure: we are distributing
creative works. Many of them are copyrighted. The law says we must
preserve those copyright notices. So you can't change the line in
YEmacs which says "Copyright 2003 S. Author". We wish to distribute
Free software: we wish to give software to people, and to give them
also legal permission to modify and distribute it. This means that we
must give them a copyright license. We have this Free Software. We'd
like to distribute it in a Free way... so we give the recipients the
license to tell them how they can modify and distribute the software.
It's not part of any program, just infrastructure put alongside the
programs: not distributed for any useful purpose for anybody except
for informing users of their legal rights.
I'd like to point out also that if your goal is to preserve RFCs in
Debian, you would probably do better to argue "I cannot see any
argument for preserving the GPL in Debian which does not also argue
for preserving RFCs in Debian".
> > 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.
It does. The copyright on the Preamble, and on the combination of the
Preamble and the license text, is strong. The copyright on the
license text itself is probably not defensible. It doesn't matter too
much, given the license to create new documents derivative of the GPL.
-Brian
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