Re:

["Michael K. Edwards" <m.k.edwards@gmail.com>]

On 5/19/05, Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net> wrote:
[snip arguments that might have been worthy of rebuttal on
debian-legal five months ago]

I'm not trying to be snotty about this, but if you want to engage in
the debate about the proper legal framework in which to understand the
GPL, I think you would do best to at least dip into recent
debian-legal archives and also look at some of the precedents cited
back in December and January.  At this point, there seem to be quite a
few people who agree that the FSF's stance ("copyright-based license")
and the far-from-novel one that you advance ("unilateral license /
donee beneficiaries") are untenable in the jurisdictions with whose
law they are to some degree familiar.

> And finally, for Debian's purposes, it's even more irrelevant.  Our
> standing policy is that if there is doubt about the force or intention
> of a license, we err on the side of simply doing what the licensor
> demands.

Which is great, until you find yourself estopped from arguing
otherwise in a courtroom.  It matters both what you do and why you say
you do it.

Cheers,
- Michael