On Jun 19, 2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx> 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@{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-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
