On Wed, 05 Jan 2005, Craig Sanders wrote: > On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 04:13:25PM +1100, Matthew Palmer wrote: > > Ghods, not this one again. The GPL, as a text of it's own, would > > most certainly fail the DFSG. > > it doesn't matter what reason we might have for distributing it. > what matters is that doing so is clearly against the DFSG and the > SC. <snip> > alternatively, maybe nobody thought about it before and everyone > just assumed that it wasn't a problem. well, we know better now. This was brought up in the context of the most recent DFSG/SC vote as an implied exception, nearly a year ago.[1] If a significant number of people feel that this is an exception that was not implied, there is nothing stopping them from putting together an amendment to make the exception explicit. Copyright statements and the licenses that they include are necessarily non-modifiable, and thus fail the DFSG because of it. The GNU GPL, were it to be included for its own sake, would not satisfy the terms of the DFSG, and thus could not be included in main or contrib. However, because it is included by reference in the copyright statement, the legally relevant part of it must be included, and cannot be modified. Like it or not, this is part of the legal game that must be played in order to have any free software at all. Don Armstrong 1: http://people.debian.org/~terpstra/message/20040129.031954.8111224d.en.html -- "...Yet terrible as UNIX addiction is, there are worse fates. If UNIX is the heroin of operating systems, then VMS is barbiturate addiction, the Mac is MDMA, and MS-DOS is sniffing glue. (Windows is filling your sinuses with lucite and letting it set.) You owe the Oracle a twelve-step program." --The Usenet Oracle http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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