Fedora Freedom and linux-libre

Alexandre Oliva aoliva at redhat.com
Thu Jun 19 20:13:05 UTC 2008


On Jun 19, 2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at 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@{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}




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list