Fedora Freedom and linux-libre

[Anders Karlsson]

Okay, time-out - Hitler and the Nazi's, Goodwins Law invoked.

There, kill the thread already.

* Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat.com> [20080618 22:03]:
> On Jun 14, 2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> >>> I'm not mistaken. Everything in there except the conditional grant to
> >>> use, modify, distribute is a restriction.
> 
> >> Like what?  Tell me *anything* you could do in the absence of the GPL,
> >> that, by accepting the GPL, you can no longer do.
> 
> > Given (or knowing about) a library not covered by the GPL, I can write
> > and distribute original work that uses the functions provided by that
> > library, knowing that anyone can obtain their own copy of by my code
> > and the additional library and use them together.
> 
> Assuming you have permission from the copyright holder of the library
> to do so.  If you do, whether or not the library is also available
> under the GPL won't make any difference.
> 
> I get the impression you misunderstood the question.  I'm not asking
> something you could do if you had some other permissive license that
> you couldn't do with the GPL.  What I'm asking is whether you know of
> anything that, in the absence of a copyright license, you could do
> with a work, that, after accepting the GPL, you could no longer do.
> 
> This would be a prohibition of the GPL.
> 
> Anything else that you might believe to be a prohibition of the GPL is
> actually a prohibition from copyright law, that the GPL refrains from
> lifting.
> 
> >> Another fallacy.  "You can redistribute under the same license"
> >> doesn't divide, it has quite the opposite effect.  It's permitting
> >> redistribution under any licenses that may lead to forks, including
> >> ones that don't permit further modifications.
> 
> > You can't permit redistribution of something you have prohibited from
> > existing in the first place.
> 
> You could, but this doesn't apply to the GPL anyway.
> 
> The GPL doesn't forbid [anything, not even] the creation of any
> derived works (and no permission is needed to create non-derived
> works).
> 
> > for example the original BSD license which is about as far from
> > proprietary as you can get.
> 
> Not true, in two senses.
> 
> 1. the modified BSD license is even more permissive than the original
> BSD license, and it is GPL-compatible :-)
> 
> 2. there is a lot of non-Free (as you say, proprietary) Software
> distributed in part or as a whole under the original and the modified
> BSD licenses
> 
> > I agree that the separation would be more obvious
> > if the bits were not embedded as data in the kernel in whatever format
> > the compiler decides to use
> 
> ... and the code hadn't been modified so as to require the presence of
> those bits in there and so on...
> 
> > You could probably modify the compiler to store data in a separate
> > file instead of whatever embedded memory-loading format it currently
> > uses but it wouldn't change the copyright status of the output.
> 
> Agreed.  The resulting object file would be just as derived from both,
> and the source file modified to require the presence of the firmware
> would still be just as derived from both.
> 
> -- 
> 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}
> 
> -- 
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-- 
Anders Karlsson <anders at trudheim.co.uk>
All-Round Linux Tinkerer & RHCE