Re: Cypherpunks anti-License
On Feb 25, 2004, at 17:54, Henning Makholm wrote:
Scripsit Anthony DeRobertis <asd@suespammers.org>
Licensing
The CPL is not a license, it does not require the user to do or not
do anything; the user does not agree to any terms, because there are
no terms, and the user does not need to do anything to indicate
acceptance or rejection of the CPL.
OK.
But indicative of confused thinking. The legal core meaning of the
word "license" is that it gives permissions. It is the giving of
permissions that makes a thing a "license", whether or not there are
any strings attached. The author seems to think that it is attached
strings that are meant by the word "license", which is simply wrong.
Well, if you look elsewhere, the software is in the public domain. So
it's not a license, because you can't have a license when its in the
public domain...
I agree, someone is quite confused.
We should not delete paragraphs from upstream license statements.
It might be necessary to state in the copyright file that Debian as a
project does not make the promise. But I think it is not necessary.
It's not a license. It's a promise from upstream. I think we should
make that clear.
The legally competent persons distributing the software are
the maintainer, the ftp-masters, and the mirror admins.
... and the organizations that operate those mirrors. They may want to.
More importantly, neither you, I, nor Hubert Chan can make that promise
on their behalf. It'd be wrong to put a paragraph in the package which
claims to have done so.
* under a different license of their choosing
A derived work, yes; the work, not really. As in he could claim to,
but he could not enforce it.
Probably the license author can conceive of a jurisdiction where a
distributor could claim a copyright-like interest in copies he
distributes, without any creative effort.
Nah, I'd say to see your first paragraph; I think he's just confused...
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