On Jul 13, 2007, Michael Eager <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Alexandre Oliva wrote: >> On Jul 13, 2007, Robert Dewar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> See, I'm not diminishing the importance of licensing issues, I'm just >> saying it's legally irresponsible to sit back and *not* even watch >> what's going on in the development of the license
> Everybody's been watching. The license has changed many times. No. Many have been participating. And those could influence the outcome, at least to some extent. Of course the major features of GPLv3 were non-negotiable for the FSF, and these have been clear and unchanged in principle all the way from the beginning. But a number of other significant legal issues, as well as the details on how to accomplish the needed features, were up for discussion and the participants could see how their input was taken into account. As for those who sat back, relaxed and watched, it was their choice. The invitation to participate was open to all, and those who didn't want to "waste time", as you put it, back then, have set themselves up to "waste time and lag behind" now. > There's been on-going conflict between FSF and Linux. How is that even relevant? And then, the FSF took into account the opinions from a number of major Linux developers who refused to participate in the open development process. Not when they requested the removal of major features that the FSF deemed necessary, of course. As if some external contributor would post patches to remove support for a major OS and then complain that our process isn't open because we didn't agree with the rationale for the patch and thus didn't accept the patch. > There's been widely publicized conflicts about about DRM, and > Novell/Microsoft, patent license and other issues. All the way from the beginning, for most of these (Novell/Microsoft came up later, for obvious reasons). That's 18 months with only one addition to the feature list. >> Some people are advocating that patches be under GPLv2+, to enable >> earlier releases with backports to remain in GPLv2. Since GPLv2 has >> weaker defenses for users' freedoms than GPLv3, against those who >> might wish to impose restrictions on these freedoms, GPLv2-compatible >> patches would enable backports into more weakly-defended releases. >> The weaker defenses stem mainly out of uncertainty as to the extent of >> "no further restrictions". > Let's tone down the high falootin' rhetoric about defending freedoms > and discuss the pragmatic issues of how to manage licenses in a > real world with real companies and real lawyers and real concerns. The discussion started 18 months ago, and you were welcome to participate all the way back then. Why bring up these issues only now? -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ FSF Latin America Board Member http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED], gcc.gnu.org} Free Software Evangelist [EMAIL PROTECTED], gnu.org}
