Re: cdrecord: weird GPL interpretation
On Thu, Sep 02, 2004 at 11:18:11AM -0400, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
> I see this as a similar circumstance to Pine. UW had very clearly
> given a free license, then switched to a loopy interpretation where we
> didn't have a license to distribute modified versions. So it got
> pulled from main. They changed their license for future versions --
> sure, they called it a clarification, but it was a pretty big change.
> But Debian doesn't distribute that old pine, because -- even when the
> copyright holder has gone insane -- it's polite to accede to their
> wishes.
>
> The same action is appropriate here.
If the situation is the way you've described (that the previous Pine
license was free), I think the same action was inappropriate then.
If things are the way you described, we put the priorities of our users
and of the free software community below the priorities of someone else.
That said, if there were other reasons (for example, perhaps there were
critical bugs in the free code that no one wanted to fix, or perhaps
there was no free code), then the situation is different.
Thanks,
--
Raul
Reply to: