On Sun, Sep 19, 2004 at 01:14:42PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: > Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org> wrote: > > On Sun, Sep 19, 2004 at 12:04:00AM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: > >> RMS has in the past claimed that failure to abide by the terms of the > >> GPL results in a permanent loss of those rights (in respect to a > >> specific piece of software, at least). If you're going to disagree with > >> the copyright holder of what is probably still the largest single body > >> of GPLed software in Debian at present, I'm going to want evidence of a > >> decent legal standpoint for this opinion. > > > > RMS has in the past claimed that this has happened to various > > groups. RMS has been ignored. RMS has not pursued the matter, so one > > presumes the FSF counsel have indicated that he can't. > > So your belief that the GPL is free is entirely based on a belief that > RMS is wrong, and your belief that RMS is wrong is based on an absence > of something happening? No, it's based on the paragraph which you oh-so-convinently deleted. Don't play bullshit games. > >> If you want to claim that the only restrictions on freedom we currently > >> accept are those that are entirely controlled under copyright law, you > >> may be correct (the Apache License 2.0 is an obvious counter-example, > >> but you could always claim that that's counter to normal policy and > >> thus some sort of error). > > > > The clause you are referring to in the Apache License 2.0 has no > > effect on software without patents, due in large part to the efforts > > of -legal. It's probably non-free when applied to software with > > patents and enforced. This isn't particularly surprising; "software > > patents are non-free" is more or less a given. > > Enforced against whom? Doesn't matter. > >> We don't accept restrictions as free because they use one branch of the > >> law - we accept restrictions as free because they are either unimportant > >> or because they protect free software more than they hinder it.=20 > > > > This indicates that a proprietary license is free if the software is > > useful enough. Therefore it's wrong. > > I'm sorry, I honestly don't see how you get to that conclusion. You said that a restriction is free if it protects free software more than it hinders it. Therefore any license is free if it is in some way sufficiently useful to free software, regardless of what restrictions it introduces. You have introduced the notion that restrictions can be excused. > > We don't accept restrictions because they protect free software more > > than they hinder it. We accept restrictions because they do not > > appreciably hinder it. There is no excuse for significant > > restrictions, nor has one ever been excused. > > The GPL's incompatibility with various other licenses hinders free > software. This is a feature of both licenses together. You cannot claim that the GPL is somehow responsible, for example: > We don't consider that to be a problem because we believe that > the right to receive GPLed code with no further restrictions is more > important than the right to, say, produce a derived work of GPLed code > and OpenSSL. ...the SSLeay license, part of OpenSSL, which has a clause that was written for the explicit purpose of hindering combination with GPLed works. There is nothing in the GPL that you can point to and say "This clause hinders free software". Furthermore, this is not a significant restriction. It is trivial to release your free software under a GPL-compatible license, and this is not appreciably burdensome. The occasions where it doesn't happen can invariably be traced to laziness or political obstructionism. > My suspicion is that if we were writing the DFSG today > rather than in 1997, we wouldn't have any significant qualms about > accepting licenses which restricted your ability to use software patents > against the developers. I'm pretty sure that we'd include a clause to explicitly prohibit it. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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