On Jul 23, 2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Gordon Messmer wrote: > You do have the freedom and right to license > your own work under any terms you want. Nope. You have that legal right, but you're only operating within your freedom as long as your choice respects others' freedom. If it doesn't, then you're using your right to exert power. > You do have the freedom and right to redistribute other works under > other licenses, free or with other arrangements. You are entitled to the freedom to redistribute works, subject to respecting others' freedoms. The choice of license is not part of freedom, it's part of power. If there wasn't copyright law, nobody would need any license from you. Copyright law creates a legal right that gives you power to control how others can use your own. And then, as a consequence of this very law, you don't always have a right to redistribute works. Others are legally entitled to exert power over you, even when that conflicts with your freedom. So, no, because of copyright, you may end up without the right and without the freedom you claim above. > But you must give up your freedom and rights or you are unable to > participate in distributing these things as part of a work that > contains any GPL-covered material. The "or" denounces your syllogism. The "must" is inappropriate when there's an alternative. As explained above, because of copyright law, you end up without that freedom and right by default, even though you should have them. The GPL respects the freedom to (re)distribute the program that you're entitled to, restoring your right to do that which copyright law took away, but not restoring your power to control how others can use the work that you're using to derive another work you want to distribute. The GPL doesn't require you to give up anything. It only restores some of your rights that copyright law took away, so that essential freedoms are respected for you and for every other user. > But the point is that you also cannot impose fewer restrictions, 1. a grant of rights cannot possibly impose restrictions to whatever you could do before you received those rights. It's a grant, so it adds. It's not a contract, so it can't take away. 2. you can grant additional permissions as to any part of the whole, if you're the copyright holder for that part. Nothing whatsoever stops you from doing that: not copyright law, not any copyright license. > Please point out any exception you can find to section 2b. Here: * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions * are met: * 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. * 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the * documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. * 3. [rescinded 22 July 1999] * 4. Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors * may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software * without specific prior written permission. additional permissions on top of those granted by the GPL. No matter what the GPL says, you still have the permissions above as to any file in which these permissions are written down. What makes you think they're revoked just because the whole is under the GPL? Only your flawed theory that the GPL imposes restrictions that would somehow take away rights you had or received with the program. Show what part of the GPL says "you give up rights you had before", or that "imposes restrictions", or hire a lawyer to explain this to you. Note: "you may do X as long as Y" is not a restriction, it's a grant. "you may not do Z under this license" is not a restriction, it's a statement of fact, if doing Z requires permission from the copyright holder. -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} FSFLA Board Member ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
