Re: Inconsistencies in our approach
On Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 08:15:45PM -0400, Brian T. Sniffen wrote:
> > 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.
That grant actually has a lot of catches in it; they exclude the entire
preamble and provide restrictions on the instructions for use.
> > 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.
Nope, that doesn't fly; almost all copyright statements using the GPL say
"under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation". The GPLOmitPreamble citation says that the preamble
may not be omitted, which is consistent with the text in the GPL itself.
Therefore, we can't substitute the preamble-less "Debian GPL" alternative
license.
> > 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?
Steve Langasek cited one for me:
Message-ID: <20030731201115.GB17219@tennyson.netexpress.net>
It seems that everybody's reasons for allowing the GPL but not the RFCs boil
down to that: GPL'd software is important to us, and we're required to ship
the GPL with that software.
Why else would there be a double standard?
> 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.
Couldn't the same be said about RFCs? They're not distributed for any
useful purpose for anybody except for informing developers of
possibly-inaccurate best practices.
> 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".
While I think RFCs should remain, that is not the point of this, but I
believe I have been advancing just that argument (well, its corollary, but
I'd agree with this one too.)
> 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.
That still leaves us with a non-free Preamble.
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