On 2/2/2010 1:42 PM, Alexander Terekhov wrote:
http://www.ipinfoblog.com/archives/Open%20Source%20Legal%20Issues.pdf See the light Hyman?
I see that Nimmer is unsurprisingly excellent at describing the issues around free licenses, open source licenses, and the GPL in particular. Of course, most of those complexities arise when someone is seeking to deny downstream recipients the same rights that they themselves have been given, in which case the free software licensor has no interest in making things easier for the licensee. > In a stunning example of double-speak, the Preamble to the GPL > describes the reason for such provisions in the GPL in terms of > protecting the licensee's rights: > > To protect your rights, ... The GPL says <http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl.html> Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things. To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others. I don't know why Nimmer thinks this is double-speak. It's not the right to distribute as you wish that the GPL is protecting, it's the canonical four freedoms the the FSF has always promoted, as enumerated in the preceding paragraph. When you incorporate GPLed code into your own project, you are able to do so because the GPL has protected your right to receive source code and to be able to redistribute it. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
