Why is Fedora not a Free GNU/Linux distributions?

Alexandre Oliva aoliva at redhat.com
Sat Jul 26 12:58:48 UTC 2008


On Jul 26, 2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:

> Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> 
>> 2. You may [...] provided that you also meet all of these conditions
>> 
>>> There's no room to interpret that as saying "or some other license
>>> you found on some web page"
>> 
>> There's no denying of this possibility, and there couldn't be.
>> Welcome to the world of copyright.  Seriously, do us all a favor, and
>> go talk to a lawyer.  Ask the FSF.

> The FSF has gone so far as to say that not only does everything
> included in the work as a whole when distributed together have to be
> covered by the GPL, by also anything that might conceivable be
> connected to create a derived work, such as a library distributed
> separately.

That's correct.  All of the permissions (you may...provided that...)
are granted over the whole and every piece of the work, and derived
versions thereof.

This is true regardless of whether any piece of the code is also
covered by additional permissions or alternate licenses.

Only your imagined license that restricts what you can do and
conflicts with other licenses you might have does what you think the
GPL does.

>> Please stop spreading misinformation.

> That's funny - remember this post is in response to my exact quote of
> the license section 2b.  Do you really consider what the license
> actually say as misinformation?

When you quote it out of context, you turn it into misinformation,
yes.

Please.  If you are serious about trying to make progress in this
discussion, go talk to a lawyer and stop making things up.  If you
proceed further without talking to a lawyer, the only possible
conclusion is that you are only interested in wasting our time.

FTR, I did get a lawyer's opinion on that, from the same legal counsel
that advises the FSF, who happens to be the author and the copyright
holder of AFAIK the largest body of code available under the GPL.

-- 
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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