[copyleft-next] [MERGE REQUEST] restore "install and run" text (was Re: app-stores and copyleft-next)

Theodore Ts'o tytso at mit.edu
Fri Dec 14 19:34:13 UTC 2012


On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 10:22:06AM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote:
> 
> What is interesting about the GPLv3 ancestor of the deleted clause is
> that it appears to avoid the traditional tiresome legal debate about
> GPLv2, shared libraries and 'derivative works' by instead focusing on
> what one has to provide as a matter of source code if one distributes
> (conveys) a binary.

I'll observe if indeed the goal was to bypass the whole question of
"derivitive works", then there is the danger that it could change the
general understanding of what is and isn't covered in a dramatic
fashion.  This is because I've heard people "steeped in the FSF
interpreative tradition" claim that the GPLv2 should (at least from
their moral/ethical calculus) infect across an RPC call.  This
interpretation had been strictly ruled out because it's clear that a
program running on a completely different computer on the other side
of a network connection very clearly could not be reached via
copyright law due restrictions to what I judge would likely tolerate
via-a-vis stretching the definition of derivitive before throwing a
lawyer who tried to claim that the GPL infected across an RPC call out
of the courtroom.

If we bypass the protections of the common law interpretation of what
deritive works mean, then "intimate data flow" could easily be
interpreted to include non-copyleft-next source code which tries to
call copyleft-next code across a network connection via an RPC, and I
think that would be a huge change.

							- Ted


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