Re: Social Contract GR's Affect on sarge

[Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu>]

Francesco Paolo Lovergine <frankie@debian.org> writes:

> Ah that's an interesting point. TCP/IP is a standard, so it's non free...
> Maybe all implementation of that should go in contrib so, because
> they 'depend' on a piece of 'something' which is not free. So, we
> have to move the whole kernel there, and oh sure, libc too...

Fortunately, we have a formal definition of dependency, in the sense
of the Depends: lines which dpkg and apt use, as well as copyright
laws which clearly protect only expressions, not ideas themselves.  As
others here have said, the text of the standard is copyrighted; the
standard is not, and so implementations of it are not derivative works
of the standard.

-- 
Brian Sniffen                                       bts@alum.mit.edu