Re: Interpreting the GFDL GR
Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net> wrote:
>> Read in English, naturally by a native speaker, the license clearly
>> applies restrictions against "chmod", etc, and the above
>> interpretation does not come from the license.
>
> I agree on both counts. Yet rather than taking the GR to mean that
> restrictions against chmod are OK in general, I think the GR says that
> the GFDL should not be taken to imply restrictions against chmod. If
> that leads to using an interpretaion that does not come from the
> license, then so be it - it's a lesser evil than deciding that free
> software does not need to be chmodable.
For what it's worth, I voted for Amendment B over the original text
because I am convinced that no court (at least in my legislation, I have
not much knowledge of others) would rule that someone has violated the
license because of chmod or similar - simply because it is the normal
state in the computer world, even on Windows systems, that stuff is
not-world readable. Or in other words because this restriction would
make the whole license void, and that can't be what the licensor
intended.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)
Reply to: