On Sun, Sep 19, 2004 at 03:50:26PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: > Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org> wrote: > > On Sun, Sep 19, 2004 at 01:14:42PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: > >> 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. > > In general, we respect the interpretation of licenses that the license > author and copyright holder wish to enforce. We may not always agree > with it, but we tend to respect it (see the Pine case, for example). You > have come up with an argument for why you believe RMS to be incorrect, > but you have come up with no argument for why we should act on your > interpretation. I do not see a need to argue that it is worthwhile to discard non-compelling attempts to declare the GPL non-free, especially when the copyright holder has frequently demonstrated that they're just generating noise. We do not respect them when they make absurd claims about interpretation. Reiser is a good example. > >> > 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. > >>=20 > >> Enforced against whom? > > > > Doesn't matter. > > So a single enforcement action of a patent at some point in the past > should result in us treating that software as non-free? How about > patents that are only enforced in certain countries? I'm actually > genuinely interested in this. Our track record on dealing with patented > code isn't entirely consistent. We probably ought to make that clearer. I can't think of anything else that makes sense. If they've enforced it once then they'll do it again; our stance on patents is largely based on the assumption that they *never* will. Besides, everybody is a potential Debian user; it has to be free for all of them. > >> > This indicates that a proprietary license is free if the software is > >> > useful enough. Therefore it's wrong. > >>=20 > >> 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. > > In order to be interesting in this case, the restrictions must have the > aim of helping free software. The usefulness or otherwise of the > software is completely irrelevent. Sorry, I though that was clear from > context. So a restriction is free if it says that you can only have a license to the software in exchange for releasing software under a free license valued at a minimum of £20k (insert some arbitrary valuation scheme in here)? How about one that says you can have a license in exchange for a donation of £300 to Debian, or the FSF? > >> 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. > > > >=2E..the SSLeay license, part of OpenSSL, which has a clause that was > > written for the explicit purpose of hindering combination with GPLed > > works. > > So the SSLeay license has a restriction that hinders free software? Your > argument appears to imply that we should consider this non-free. > Instead, we appear to have decided that the restriction doesn't hinder > the freedoms that we consider important. Again you have deleted the relevant paragraph where I answered this. > >> 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. > > I can't see any evidence whatsoever that there's a strong majority who > would agree with that. Then I can't see any evidence that there's a strong majority supporting your attempt to hand over control of free software to large corporations. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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