On Jun 19, 2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> Yeah, it's unfortunate when this happens. In general,
authors who use
> the GPL for its intended purpose (ensuring the 4 freedoms are
> respected for all users) won't object to the combination of their
> works with other works that respect users' freedoms, and will grant
> additional permissions for the combinations in spite of the license
> conflicts.
I don't believe that is generally true except for perl and the
few
other dual-licensed packages where the authors understood the issue
from the start.
Your beliefs don't match facts.
Look for GPLed packages with an additional exception to combine with
say openssl, just as an example.
And worse, there is no accounting for copyright ownership since
anyone could have added code and most packages have no one who could
grant such permission
Yeah, legal maintainability is important and it's sad that so many
people prefer to disregard this aspect. Any ideas of how to improve
this mindset?
> So, yeah, it's unfortunate, but I don't think it's
really such a big
> deal. Nearly all Free Software *is* available under the GPL and
> compatible licenses anyway.
And there's where we differ. I think it is a big deal, has put
free
software decades behind where it might otherwise be, and has kept
affordable alternatives to monopoly-ware out of the picture almost
completely.
At the expense of its no longer being Free Software? What would the
point be, again?
> Sparing a user from becoming dependent on a piece of proprietary
> software might even be a sacrifice for the user, but it's actually an
> advantage for the user and for society in the long run.
You can't be 'dependent' on software as long as there are
alternate
choices.
'course not, sir :-), who'd have thunk :-) that OOXML doesn't describe
the file formats actually used by MS-Office 2007 and that Microsoft
holds patents that could prevent alternate choices from implementing
compatibility with MS-Office 2007 (rather than with OOXML), eh?
--
Alexandre Oliva
http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist oliva(a){lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member ¡Sé Libre! =>
http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva(a){redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}