Re: Eclipse 3.0 Running ILLEGALY on Kaffe
Walter Landry wrote:
Dalibor Topic <robilad@kaffe.org> wrote:
You have made a very convincing argument that "required to install" is
too broad. My criteria is "required to run".
I've showed that your interpretation of 'required to run' is too broad,
as you attempt to stretch it in the same direction, by arguing from the
'but they are both installed together in main' angle.
Eclipse does not require Kaffe to run, it runs very well on many other
VMs. Eclipse in main would require Kaffe to be installed, but wouldn't
necessarily require it run, as you still could run it perfectly fine
with other VMs.
When Debian puts Eclipse into main, Debian is distributing Eclipse to
be used with Kaffe. When it is in contrib, Debian is distributing
Eclipse to be used by something outside of main.
Nope. The GPL does not allow you to say 'you must use this data with
that program and that program alone'. That interpretation of the GPL
would violate freedom 0.
You have no right to limit how I run a program I get from you licensed
under the GPL. If you do that, you lose the rights to distribute the
program under the GPL at all, as the GPL does not allow you to add
restrictions to it. That hold for Kaffe just as well as it holds for,
say, your http://www.nongnu.org/arx/ project. You can't restrict me to
use ArX only for GPLd projects, in general.
ArX is actually pretty facinating. Looking at the ArX stable release,
that I downloaded from your page at
http://superbeast.ucsd.edu/~landry/ArX/ArX-1.0.20.tar.gz it is under the
GPL, but the GPLd tarball actually incorporates some non-GPL-compatible
boost libraries according to ArX-1.0.20/src/boost/libs/graph/LICENSE and
your post at
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/arx-users/2004-12/msg00019.html
I'm not saying that ArX violates the GPL, as I have no idea what you do
with the non-GPL compatible code, and I, contrary to some other people
I've talked to, would be very wary of making such accusations to my
peers without knowing precisely what I'm talking about, and in the case
of ArX, I don't.
What strikes me as odd is that under your whole reasoning of how GPL
applies to Eclipse and Kaffe you have been trying to argue that debian
should show a lot of scruple about putting a GPLd work and a separate
GPL-incompatible work on the same medium because you believe that to
create a non-distributable combined work, instead of mere aggregation,
if the GPLd work is modified, but you seem to show no such scruple to
incorporate verbatim a GPL-incomaptible work into your GPLd work, ArX,
modify ArX and distribute the result from your web site. Given that ArX
is RFP-ed according to
http://lists.debian.org/debian-wnpp/2004/12/msg00306.html I'm wondering
what the fine line is that you, as the author of ArX draw to explain why
you think the collective works clause you seem to cling to applies to
Kaffe + Eclipse, but doesn't do so to ArX.
To me, it's quite obvious that since they are distributable, independant
works, they can be distributed on the same medium, and that's what the
GPL says, and the FSF does. [1]
The FSF has an explicit exemption from all of the copyright holders
(i.e. themselves).
Where would that explicit exemption be? I can't find none, because none
is necessary, afaict.
Do you think the FSF has such a bizarre explicit exemption to the GPL of
all the copyright holders on all the code packaged 'to run' [1] in
ututo-e which the FSF redistributes from their servers?
I prefer to trust the FSF's judgement on the GPL :)
cheers,
dalibor topic
[1] https://e.ututo.org.ar/repository/
[2] ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu+linux-distros/ututo-e/
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