Re: [PROPOSAL] Full text of GPL must be included
I have an idea: we hack gzip to automatically decompress a particular
coding sequence to the text of the GPL. Then all we have to do is
force people to use our hacked gzip (screw up the magic in our header)
and we don't have to use any additional space in the distribution.
In all seriousness: I think this issue is a red herring. If RMS
really cared about this, he would have gone after Red Hat (or
Slackware or SLS or sunsite.unc.edu) years ago. If people use our
packages outside the system that we control, there is little we can do
to make them obey the licensing terms or read the GPL. Besides, I
can't see how anyone using any Linux distribution could not have a
copy of the GPL somewhere on their system; locate shows 13 files
called COPYING on my woody system at work, all of which are instances
of the GPL or LGPL, 9 of which are part of Debian packages (including
Netscape, libtool, automake, and XEmacs). This of course excludes
/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL.
Chris
--
Chris Lawrence <cnlawren@olemiss.edu> - http://www.lordsutch.com/chris/
Computer Systems Manager (Physics & Astronomy, 125 Lewis, 662-915-5765)
Instructor, POL 101 (Political Science, 208 Deupree, 662-915-5949)
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