On Mon, Oct 30, 2000 at 08:37:53AM -0800, Aaron Lehmann wrote: > How does the GPL "Not Contaminate Other Software" when any software > that so much as links to GPL'd code has restrictions placed on its > license? There's an important distinction between what the GPL is trying to do and what UWash's license is trying to do. The GPL doesn't assert the primacy of the copyright holder's authorial claims over those of contributors to the program; it merely says that any code that is "intermixed" with the licensed work is licensed compatibly. The UWash license does much more. It claims that all contributions to the licensed work are effectively the property of the copyright holder. Perhaps DFSG #4 could be interpreted in this way; the "Author" is not just the copyright holder of the program, but the contributors of all substantive contributors to the project. I won't pretend this is the most obvious way to read DFSG 4. However: Which of the following interpretations seems truer to the spirit of free software, which the DFSG is meant (in part) to communicate?: A) The originator of a project, or his or her designee, is the ultimate authority over that project, and any and all changes made to that project, even those not ultimately accepted, or accepted and later removed, become his (or hers). B) A project is a collaborative effort, and each substantial contributor to the project earns authorial status, and concomitant consideration. -- G. Branden Robinson | One man's "magic" is another man's Debian GNU/Linux | engineering. "Supernatural" is a branden@debian.org | null word. http://www.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Robert Heinlein
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