Re: cdrecord: weird GPL interpretation
On Thu, Sep 02, 2004 at 12:35:44PM -0400, Raul Miller wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 02, 2004 at 12:28:09PM -0400, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
> > The previous pine license was clearly and unambiguously free. UW, the
> > copyright holder, devised an interpretation which was non-free.
> > Debian deferred to the copyright holder's interpretation in that case.
>
> That doesn't really sound like clearly and unambiguously free, to me.
> It sounds as if at least some people in debian were convinced of the
> copyright holder's interpetation.
How is "Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software...
is hereby granted" ambiguous? [1] It seems clear that UW deliberately
contrived a bogus "interpretation" of their license in order to revoke
their freeing of Pine. I've never heard of anyone in Debian actually
believing in it.
It's possible to devise interpretations of most licenses which are non-free.
One which came up recently was the MIT license: one could claim that
"supporting documentation" includes even manuals written by a third party
and not derived from the software at all. Aside from probably being
unenforcable, this would certainly be non-free license contamination.
[1] http://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/legal.html#10.2
(Accusing Free Software programmers of "perverting" the license by doing
things they were clearly granted permission to do; that's wonderful.)
--
Glenn Maynard
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