| Branden Robinson 2004-08-02, 5:58 pm |
| On Wed, Jul 28, 2004 at 05:16:36PM -0600, Joel Baker wrote:
[on the 4-clause BSD license's compelled-advertising clause being
GPL-incompatible]
> As a point of note, RMS has said that this interpretation is considered to
> be a bug in the GPL, and that the FSF has no current intention of pursuing
> violations of this, because it wasn't intended (they still, of course,
> recommend going to a 3 or even 2 clause variant of the license).
>
> I believe I still have the email somewhere in my archives if necessary, but
> to date it hasn't been terribly relevant.
That's useful to know, but not dispositive for Debian's purposes. That the
FSF regards this as a violation they can overlook doesn't mean other people
using the GNU GPL won't, and there are many. (Harald Welte of the
netfilter Project is just one example of recent prominence.)
The DFSG-freeness of a particular license as interpreted by a particular
licensor on a particular work is almost always the most important
evaluation that Debian has to make.
For further reading:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17409
http://lwn.net/Articles/95006/
--
G. Branden Robinson | It's like I have a shotgun in my
Debian GNU/Linux | mouth, I've got my finger on the
branden@debian.org | trigger, and I like the taste of
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | the gunmetal. -- Robert Downey, Jr.
|