Re: JFORK: Or a reasonable response to the Sun SCSL
bernd kreimeier wrote:
> On his own code minus all past contributions. Big F*** Deal.
>
> What's your point? Linus can't take the past contributions
> with him (Copyright Alan Cox, Donald Becker, ...). He
> can't take back what he has released before. Your point
> is essentially that he can stop to contribute to the
> existing code, and that he can re-use his own contributions
> to the existing kernel under a different license in a
> different context. That'll leave him with what?
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Making NO claims for the value of such, it leaves All of his own code,
to do with as he pleases, under any license that he pleases.
>
> I am not a big fan of the GPL, but it works. The more
> cooperative an effort, the less probability for a single
> individual or minority to hijack the combined results.
>
> The only ways to retain that amount of control are to require
> all outside contributions to be put in the public domain,
> to have the contributors waive their rights explicitly
> in you favor, or to never accept contributions. Even then,
> you could not undo your earlier releases, so you'd still
> have to outpace the open branch based on your last free
> release.
>
> What's the problem?
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None, I agree with your analysis.
> That people should make themselves familiar with Copyright
> law, followed by a quite bogus statement on what that very
> law combined with current kernel licensing would allow for.
>
> The hypothetical "Evil Linus" case you have construed is near
> meaningless.
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The entire purpose of my "hypothetical" case was to portray an EXTREME
posibility that would elicit visions of the worst scenerio that I could
think of for the Linux community. I certainaly did not mean to imply
that I think that is likely to happen, as I hold Linus in high esteem,
both as an individual with humanitarian ideals, and as a skilled system
developer.
>The SCSL is a serious, imminent danger.
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I think we All agree on that. The question that initially was posed is
what do we do about it. I am offering a suggestion for a possible
longterm solution. I fully realize that this is simply an idea, and
maybe a usless one. My goal here is to get folks interested in doing
something to solve the problem. That takes momentum, and most of the
people on the main Debian list are not even aware of these issues. I am
not a java developer and have not claimed to be one. I do have a serious
interest in seeing the "java" ideal of "write once, run everywhere"
being part of the free software movement, I think that this will be
necessary for ANY open source system if it is to survive.
>Mixing
> these up is just FUD on the Linux end, and irrelevant on the
> Java end. Hope I have been a bit more successful this time
> in explaining what I find so annoying here.
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I will conceed that it was an extreme scenerio, and that was
intentional, as stated above. I do not mean to annoy you or anyone else.
I am however, aware that if I throw "my opinions" out there for the
world to view, there will probably be someone that disagrees with it:-)
That said, I hope to keep the interest of people focussed on the real
problem, the SCSL, since we both agree that it is a REAL BAD THING.
--
John Foster
AdVance-Computing Systems
jfoster@augustmail.com
ICQ# 19460173
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