Etienne Gagnon wrote:
My point was precisely that the document you referred to, cannot be used as a basis to represent all of Kaffe's copyright holders opinion.
The document that represents all of Kaffe's copyright holders opinion is the GPL.
In a related matter, and given you insistence as "representing" Kaffe's copyright holders on the interpretation of the terms of the GNU GPL, could you show us a signed proxy(?) by all of Kaffe copyright holders, to speak in they name. More precisely, in law terms, are you "a duly authorized agent" of all Kaffe's copyright holders?
Well, I'm the guy that gets the regular anti-Kaffe, anti-GPL fanmail from you and Gadek since 2002, and has to deal with this nonsense regularly ever since.
Nevertheless, I speak for myself. I don't run around collecting signatures. Other copyright holders of Kaffe are free to disagree with me. They are bound by the GPL, though, just as I am.
I'm representing one Kaffe developer, that is me, who is fed up with having to deal with the repeated unproven claims that Debian packagers are doing something illegal by using Kaffe for their work. In order to debunk those unproven claims I have repeatedly offered an interpretation of the GPL that matches precisely what the FSF says, what the GPL says and runs contrary to your interpretation. Tough cookies. Deal with it.
Which Kaffe copyright holder are you a 'a duly authorized agent' of? Could you show us a signed proxy, or whatever that is?
Do you have any proof of a copyright holder on Kaffe enforcing this bogus interpretation of the GPL of yours on anyone or is this all based on hearsay?Why do you claim that the interpretation is "bogus"? You have made no proof to that effect.
I've posted several e-mails in this thread. Read them.
Are you implying that the Debian project should publish works without caring about license terms, until somebody sues Debian? As far as I can tell, this has not been the traditional approach of debian-legal; on the contrary, debian-legal's tradition has been to study license terms and to come up to a consensus as to whether they correspond to the project's criteria or not, and to minimize the risks of being sued, independently of who the copyright holder was.
No. I never said that. As you can not sue debian for breaching your author rights on Kaffe as you are not an author, for all I know, and you're the only person pushing this bizarre theory of an automatism in the GPL, your claim amounts to 'some Kaffe copyright owner might sue Debian without merit, but IANAL, ask one'. The same holds for SableVM as well. Or any other project distributed by Debian. The risk is the same, save that Kaffe gets all the bad love from SableVM every few months, and gets dragged through mud.
The funny thing about your argument is that you never make a specific file and line assertion about a GPL violation in the Eclipse package. It's all handwaving and 'i've talked to rms'.
Which GPLd, copyrightable part of Kaffe is in the Eclipse packages? In which file? How did it get there? And why does that consitute a GPL violation?
Irrelevant to this discussion, as a program using standard Java interfaces is not automatically a derived work from Kaffe, not matter how you try to twist it.Where did you see this in the Copyright law? You are simply asserting your beliefs, not the text of law. I did base all my assertion on the text of law and the text of the GNU GPL. Please do not *only* cite US court decisions as the single basis for your claims, as they have no bearing in Canada and many other countries in which Debian is distributed. Even though I only showed the Canadian law text, given the existing international conventions, it is quite likely that the laws in US and many other countries are very similar to the one I have shown.
Well, what gives SableVM the right to implement the JVM specification, in Canada, then? Afaict from running strings on the binary, it incorporates tiny parts of the JVM specification, like 'String', 'java', 'lang', 'Exception' verbatim. Is SableVM therefore illegal in Canada or did you get a permission from Sun to do so?
Or can't we just distribute it in Canada?
As far as I know, law and licenses have precedence over Andrew Suffield opinions, even though I do greatly respect his insight in licensing issues. So, please address specific issues in the text of law and in the license text, and stop asserting that your or anybody's opinion as a definitive interpretation of the GPL.
I'm certainly not asserting that your interpretation of the GPL is the definitive one ;) If you could do the same, that would be just dandy, and we wouldn't have to go through this stupid, annoying, ridiculously boring pissing match.
cheers, dalibor topic