Re: New 'Public Domain' Licence
On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 09:52:38PM -0700, Raul Miller wrote:
> You seem to be trying to talk about this in an impartial manner,
> but as long as you talk in terms of "minimizing all obstacles"
> you're not doing so.
The GPL deliberately places obstacles to code reuse: it disallows reuse by
projects that don't release every bit of linked code (more or less) under
a GPL-compatible license, in the hope of increasing code reuse in the long
term. I believe that to be a simple, obvious statement of fact, and not one
that anyone should be offended by: the GPL restricts use of code, to use
free software as an incentive for other authors to place their own works
under GPL-compatible licenses.
I'll readily acknowledge myself preferring permissive licenses, and I'm
trying to be "impartial" enough to keep the thread from degenerating into
an argument of philosophies (or semantics), though I don't claim that my
opinion doesn't color my speech despite my efforts. My main interest in
the thread was explaining how even the minor restrictions of the MIT license
can be cumbersome, and why a person using permissive licenses might reasonable
want something less restrictive.
> > Er, so you're saying GPL-licensed code is usable in GPL-incompatible
> > programs, as long as you think the authors won't object? I'm pretty sure
> > you don't think that, so I assume I'm misunderstanding something.
>
> Where the authors declare this intention openly, and unambiguously,
> that's exactly what I mean.
If they give an explicit licensing exception, and understand how that
interacts with other GPL-licensed code, sure. Not in the general case.
> > Do you mean that it's possible that an author might claim to release a
> > work into the public domain, but not actually have the right to do so
> > (eg. contractually)? That's true, but is true of all licenses ...
>
> No. Though I'll agree that that's also a possibility.
>
> I gave more detail on this issue in the message you are quoting.
I read the message, didn't quite understand what you were describing, took a
guess and asked if that's what you meant. Saying "no, read the message again"
when your point didn't come across is very rarely helpful. :)
--
Glenn Maynard
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