Re: A possible GFDL compromise
Sergey Spiridonov <sena@hurd.homeunix.org> writes:
> Brian T. Sniffen wrote:
>
>> You are incorrect. Copyright law limits how you may copy or
>> distribute the code. The GPL lifts some, but not all, of these
>> limits.
>> The GPL itself takes away nothing.
>
> According to your statement, any license do not put any restriction on
> user. It does a copyright law. GPL lifts some limits to restrict users.
This section is sufficiently far from Standard Written English that I cannot
reliably parse it. Perhaps this is what you mean:
: According to your statement, no license puts any restrictions on
: users. Copyright law does so. GPL lifts some limits which
: otherwise restrict users.
I'm going to proceed as if that's correct -- say so if it's not.
Many licenses put restrictions on users. For example, some
proprietary licenses forbid running the program for profit, or forbid
publication of quantitative critical reviews. Copyright law,
normally, does not forbid me from running a program in whatever way I
like, or from publishing true factual information.
Both of these example licenses offer me a trade: they will permit me
to do certain things otherwise forbidden by copyright law (i.e., copy the
program onto my computer) in exchange for not doing certain things
otherwise allowed by copyright law (i.e., running the program for
certain purposes, publishing reviews).
> So does FDL.
The GNU FDL, like the proprietary licenses I mentioned as examples,
offers a trade. Unlike the MIT/X11 license or the GNU GPL, the GNU
FDL does not only grant permissions to the user: it offers to trade
him some permissions in exchange for some freedoms.
The particular trade it offers is non-free.
-Brian
--
Brian T. Sniffen bts@alum.mit.edu
http://www.evenmere.org/~bts/
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