Andrew Suffield wrote:
On Wed, May 19, 2004 at 07:29:10PM +0100, Lewis Jardine wrote:"Copyright FSF, Inc; available under the GPL with no warranty, 'show license' for details", only when stdout is a tty, and a configuration option that will eliminate it completely. Is that really so bad?"Alexander Zarochentcev (zam) wrote the high low priority locking code, online resizer for V3 and V4, online repacker for V4, block allocation code, and major parts of the flush code, and maintains the transaction manager code. We give him the stuff that we know will be hard to debug, or needs to be very cleanly structured.BigStorage (www.bigstorage.com) contributes to our general fund every month, and has done so for quite a long time." - Is this really so bad?Not when I can replace it with "See /usr/share/doc/$package/CREDITS". Reiser is firmly on the other side *because* this is prohibited.
If I understand the debate correctly, Hans Reiser (and many others) believed that the removal of these credits was prohibited by GPL 2c. His 'clarifications' were only necessary when he realised that not everyone shared the same opinion. Same deal with PHPNuke.
While it does not do what Reiser thought it did (As, I think, any reasonable person who actually read the license would agree), GPL 2c does prevent certain modifications of the compiled version of the work.
If we interpret DFSG #3 as forbidding any restriction on the compiled/distributed/(not source) form of a derived work, then GPL 2c is not free.
If we interpret DFSG #3 as forbidding any restriction on the compiled/distributed/(not source) form of a derived work, except for the restriction that the compiled form must display credits, then GPL 2c is free, and so is mkreiserfs.
If we interpret DFSG #3 as forbidding any restriction on the compiled/distributed/(not source) form of a derived work, except for the restriction that the compiled form must display appropriate copyright notices, then GPL 2c is free, but arguably mkreiserfs is also free, depending on your definition of 'appropriate'
In my opinion, both GPL 2c and Reiser's 'Anti-Plagiarism License' are merely different distances down the same slippery slope; if forcing derived works to have one line of credits is OK, why not ten?
On the one hand, there is very little practical benefit from declaring GPL with 2c to be non-free (in the same way as GFDL with invariant sections was), but on the other hand, declaring that such restrictions are Free opens up a huge can of worms.
-- Lewis Jardine IANAL IANADD