Re: Eclipse 3.0 Running ILLEGALY on Kaffe
Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
I'm not talking about running; I'm talking about making a copy of
Eclipse and a copy of Kaffe and putting them both on an end-user's
system such that when I type "eclipse" I get a program made out of
both.
You don't get a program made out of both any more than you get a program
made out of less (GPL) and eclipse (CPL) by typing
less eclipse
That doesn't make eclipse a derived work of less.
As I was politely asked to educate people not getting what a derived
work is, let me use a nice, graphical analogy. A lot of talk about
software licensing is crap, so I hope you don't mind me using terms
everyone, I believe, is familar with.
You can wipe your ass with 100 USD bills without violating the copyright
law, for example. By doing that, you create a derived work of both your
shit and the 100USD bills.
Now, if the 100 USD bills came with a DFSG-free license, you could copy,
modify further and distribute your modified work to other people, if
they cared about 100 USD bills with your shit on them.
Does the fact that you can wipe wour shit with 100 USD bills means that
your shit straight out of your ass is a derived work of the 100 USD
bills you use to wipe it with? No, unless you eat some 100 USD bills
first, and can find bits and pieces of the bills in your feces.
Even if you ate 100 USD bills, and went to shit five minutes later, it
does not automatically follow that the heap shit you made five minutes
after eating the bills actually contained any portion of the bills you
ate 5 minutes ago. It could have been different bills, or something you
ate before.
That's what people mean when they say evidence is no proof.
You have to examine what's happening, dig your hands into the shit, and
find the pieces of the bills sticking out to prove that an original work
of love and labour, the pile of shit, is a derived work from the 100 USD
bills. And that's why noone with a good sense of smell likes goddamn
awful long boring pissing matches on debian-legal about hypothetical
license interpretations like this one. People get shit all over their
hands from digging around and other people start throwing shit around.
It makes everyone stink.
The visualisation of what consititues a mere aggregation of shit, and
what constitutes a heap of shit deriving from other people's shits,
invokes unpleasant images in my head, and is best left as an excercise
to the so inclined reader.
Now, can we please end this discussion?
cheers,
dalibor topic
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