FC4 or FC5

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2006-06-15 at 02:32, Sean wrote:

> But if you really feel strongly about this issue, there is an
> entire world of BSD and other projects that don't share the GPL
> license available to you.

Yes and we all use them.  Your linux distribution contains
much bsd/mit/apache/perl licensed code - licenses that do
not restrict competition and additional improvements and
have resulted in many useful products.

> The GPL is chugging along and performing quite well overall, achieving
> the things it set out to do.

Yes, preventing many similar useful products.

> > But they do.  See the RIPEM history for a good example of how
> > the FSF stopped the distribution of a free original work.
> 
> The FSF can't stop the distribution of a free original work.  They
> can comment on whether the GPL is being violated or not.  Apparently
> in the above case, there was a license conflict between the original
> RIPEM license and the GPL.

They claim that distributing a program that uses a gpl'd library
is a copyright violation even if it does not include the library
in the distribution.  There is no other way to describe that
besides stopping the distribution of another person's original
work. 

> The lawyers have battled out the Samba case, and it appears to
> be legal even in the face of whatever patents MS may hold, at least
> in Europe.

Like you said earlier - laws can change,   And there are places
besides Europe.

> But I take your general point that there will sometimes
> be legal reasons why we can't have a GPL version of something.
> 
> On the other hand there will sometimes be legal reasons why Microsoft
> can't implement something that the GPL does have.  For instance, all
> of the RCU code in the Linux kernel has only been made available to
> GPL users.  Any non GPL users can not implement that algorithm without
> paying IBM to do so.   Win some, lose some.

Having to pay doesn't automatically prevent someone from using
something.  It just is another factor in your choices. The GPL
restrictions simply take away your choices.  

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com