I'm not really familiar with debian's release management, as has been
pointed out to me with the strange effects of GR votes, so I'll only
cover the debian-legal aspects. Please reply to debian-legal alone,
asking for cc if you need it.
On 2004-07-06 18:17:45 +0100 Matthew Garrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
3) The way the DFSG is currently interpreted by debian-legal is not
obvious
to an outsider, and some interpretations are felt to be excessively
extreme.
Surely the opinions of any large group will include extremes? The
larger the group, the more likely that some will be relatively
extreme. I think this is just a symptom of people being unused to
seeing a project try to harness a large public participation.
Some companies feel that various licenses were genuine efforts to be
DFSG
free, but the discussion that followed their release was sufficiently
confrontational to reduce any desire to fix any bugs.
I think this is an important point to note. It's also part of the
reason why I think the summaries to date haven't been terribly useful
and I've tried to start discussion about them. From the response, I
suspect many d-l contributors are ignoring the summaries now, sadly. I
think that we might see something different with Evan's forthcoming CC
summary, so keep watching and please participate if you can.
[...] However, if we
want to make any significant argument here, it seems likely that we
need the
ability to make a solid legal argument as to why copyright law is the
wrong
way of handling this.
This seems simple: careless use of copyright licences to enforce
trademarks frequently results in loss of freedom to make
non-infringing use of the trademark in other (related) software. As
such, if a copyright permission condition is an "everything is
forbidden except X" trademark enforcement term, then that contaminates
other software. It doesn't matter that some other use might not
infringe the trademark: it would mean we have no copyright permissions
on the licensed software. Therefore, we would be infringing copyright.
The correct way to do this seems to be either include a simple
trademark notice, not as a condition of copyright, or to use a
statement of "X is permitted by all distributors" about the trademark
if that is what you meant.
What do you mean by "solid legal argument"? Do we need to find a
lawyer to check my reasoning?
[...] The consensus appears to be that GNOME will never ship code that
can't be run with free Java implementations.
This is good news. Well done to GNOME.
--
MJR/slef My Opinion Only and not of any group I know
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing
"To be English is not to be baneful / To be standing by
the flag not feeling shameful / Racist or partial..."
(Morrissey)
