Re: Licensing question about the BSD

[Alexander Terekhov]

Alexander Terekhov wrote:
[...]
> "Various claims made by the FSF, conflating engineering dependencies
>  with copyright infringement, are not correct as a matter of law and
>  do not form part of the agreement accepted by a licensee when
>  exercising the license granted in the GPL. Therefore,
>  notwithstanding the drafters' intentions, the GPL text as written
>  does not compel the release of source code for independently
>  authored software components that use (or are used by) GPL programs
>  through any of the usual mechanisms employed elsewhere in the
>  software industry. GPL "enforcement" actions that proceed on this
>  basis, including those against NeXT and MCC which resulted in the
>  assignment to the FSF of copyright to the Objective C and C++ front
>  ends to GCC, operate under false pretenses."
> 
>    -- Michael K. Edwards, Will the Real GNU GPL Please Stand Up?,
>       unpublished draft 10th June 2005.

Edwards says that <quote> here are a couple of messages you might 
point him [plonked GNUtian dak] to, regarding his "courts and legal 
departments don't agree":

http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/07/msg00524.html (that's 
Humberto's)

http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/07/msg00525.html
and especially the LPF amicus brief linked there, from which I like
the paragraph quoted at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/05/msg00545.html

http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/07/msg00582.html
(reasonably concise "why did the FSF effectively lose in 
Progress v. MySQL")

and on NeXT and MCC,
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/01/msg00921.html
and several comments elsewhere in that thread (or of course you 
can use the summary in the draft)

If he's more or less sincere, you can suggest that it's worth
following those threads back and forth to see rebuttals to rebuttals
and then not bothering to make those arguments that turn out not to 
be defensible.  I have never yet seen that cause someone from budging
from a "but Eben Moglen said so and the protection racket works"
position, but there's a first time for everything.  :-)

</quote>

regards,
alexander.