Re: Why is choice of venue non-free ?
On Fri, Feb 04, 2005 at 01:04:38PM +1100, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> > A licence is practically meaningless is the copyright holder doesnt
> > have the resources to defend it.
>
> Thanks for classifying all my work as meaningless. I'll just go and revoke
> the licences on all my stuff, since they're meaningless.
Err, he said the license is meaningless, not the work is meaningless.
Of course, that's bunk, too. I place most of my work, these days, under
the MIT license. I don't have the resources to defend my copyright if
someone violates that license, but it's a pretty hard license to violate,
anyway. That doesn't mean the license is meaningless--the most important
function of a *free* license is to grant permissions to users, not to place
restrictions for the copyright holder to litigate.
(Not to claim that things like "receiving credit for one's work" and
"copyleft" are unimportant, of course--but they're secondary to Free
Software compared to granting of permissions to make a work Free, allowing
modification and code reuse.)
The notion that a "license is meaningless if it can't be defended" is
grounded in the idea of licenses designed to restrict and be litigated,
rather than licenses that grant permissions and make a work Free.
--
Glenn Maynard
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