Re: [Savannah-hackers] Re: [Gforge-devel] gforge

[Tim Perdue]

James Michael DuPont wrote:
> Please avoid getting personal here tim. How many times do I have to
> tell you that I respect you, and what you are trying to do. I like
> gforge and want to use your work. 

I'm no more personal than you are. Your first message to me told me to
get a lawyer and that you were talking to debian-legal. This was not a 
private inquiry asking for clarification, it was a public attack.

> > Under your fanatic interpretation, the SOAP server is also useless to
> > us, and everything that sends/receives SOAP must also be released
> > under GPL.
>
>
> Yes. Basically. 

I think you need to take a look at "fair use" rights. I think
anyone can access the GForge database using whatever they wish. Using
the *entire schema* may be a problem, but not portions and certainly not
the data. "Fair Use" is a fundamental right, upheld by over 200 years of 
court precendent, and the GPL, whatever its text or interpretation, 
cannot be above the US Constitution.

Further, according to the FSF
( http://www.fsf.org/licenses/why-assign.html ) "If there are multiple 
authors of a copyrighted work, successful enforcement depends on having 
the cooperation of all authors" and I am certainly not going to enforce 
such a hardline position on this issue. If this text from FSF is 
correct, then it is unlikely the GPL is of any protection to the work 
we've done on GForge.

I am going to agree with Ryan on this - for version 4 this is going to 
have to be looked at carefully and figure out a path forward. It also 
appears that we must have one copyright holder (FSF?)

My vision for the future of GForge depends on it being accessible to 
everything on a network, very much like an LDAP server. This poison pill 
stuff looks like a problem.

Tim