On Wed, Jul 28, 2004 at 05:16:36PM -0600, Joel Baker wrote: [on the 4-clause BSD license's compelled-advertising clause being GPL-incompatible] > As a point of note, RMS has said that this interpretation is considered to > be a bug in the GPL, and that the FSF has no current intention of pursuing > violations of this, because it wasn't intended (they still, of course, > recommend going to a 3 or even 2 clause variant of the license). > > I believe I still have the email somewhere in my archives if necessary, but > to date it hasn't been terribly relevant. That's useful to know, but not dispositive for Debian's purposes. That the FSF regards this as a violation they can overlook doesn't mean other people using the GNU GPL won't, and there are many. (Harald Welte of the netfilter Project is just one example of recent prominence.) The DFSG-freeness of a particular license as interpreted by a particular licensor on a particular work is almost always the most important evaluation that Debian has to make. For further reading: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17409 http://lwn.net/Articles/95006/ -- G. Branden Robinson | It's like I have a shotgun in my Debian GNU/Linux | mouth, I've got my finger on the branden@debian.org | trigger, and I like the taste of http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | the gunmetal. -- Robert Downey, Jr.
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