Re: Desert island test
Ken Arromdee <arromdee@rahul.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Mar 2008, MJ Ray wrote:
> > One can spot whether it's the fault of the licence in 99% of problems
> > by asking whether a change to the licence could remove the problem.
> >
> > A change to the licence could allow desert island hacking.
> > No change to the licence could stop the bloody lunatic.
>
> No, that isn't true. A change to the license which says you don't need to
> include source would prevent the bloody murderer from being a problem,
> just like a change saying you don't need to send changes off the island
> would prevent the island from being a problem.
How could changing the license prevent the bloody lunatic from
carrying out his promise "if you distribute any code licensed under
the GPL with the corresponding source code, he will hunt you down and
kill you in cold blood"?
Lest anyone forgets, access to source code is one of the DFSG and a
prerequisite for the FSF's Four Freedoms. Even if the GPL changed and
didn't require it, the bloody lunatic would still be preventing the
software being free software for the people he/she/it covers.
Hope that explains,
--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
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