Re: On interpreting licences (was: KDE not in Debian?)
I share similar views to Mr. Hutton. Allegations have been made that KDE is
responsible of GPL abuse and copyright violation. The fact that the GPL is
generally misunderstood has served to amplify these allegations. It took me
a considerable amount of time to find Andreas Pour's arguments in the sea of
confusion that surrounds this issue. Now having found them and being
convinced by them that no GPL abuse or copyright violation exists I feel that
instead of being silenced he very much deserves to be heard.
BFN,
Don.
On Wed, 09 Feb 2000, Steve Hutton wrote:
> On Tue, 08 Feb 2000, Joseph Carter wrote:
>
> > This overglorified legal language pissing contest has gone on long enough.
> > Everybody arguing at this point is pretty much repeating themselves.
> > Right or wrong, the others arguing back are no longer listening if ever
> > they were. And at any rate, it seems this list's audience is much smaller
> > than it was. Due to misconfiguration or whatever else I cannot say--I've
> > had people tell me they're on this list (kde-licensing) and have still not
> > seen this thread appear there.
>
> Nobody else is listening, therefore the posters should quit arguing with
> each other? Interesting hypothesis and conclusion :-)
>
> I for one have rather enjoyed Mr. Pour's eloquent and reasoned
> analysis. The GPL is one of the most vague pieces of text of
> I've ever read, and the fact that these arguments about what it
> means go on for so long just underscore the point.
>
> I find it particularly amusing when people continually declare the
> GPL says this or that, and Mr. Pour points out that the license
> in fact contains no such language. More humorous are the frequent
> implications that the GPL is some kind of mutable license, subject to
> grow and change depending upon what its author says he meant
> when he wrote it. I take that back. It's more sad than funny.
>
> Steve
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