Thomas Hertweck wrote: > > Stop sending private copies of emails going to this list - there is > absolutely no reason why I (or others) should be interested in receiving > all emails twice!
On other lists dropping people from CC is seen as unfriendly. Thanks for your understanding. > Now back to the actual topic: > [...] > You're actively supporting this "social pressure" issue because it suits > your opinion. Yes. And I'm proud of it. Seriously, social pressure is more likely to nudge people into compliance than any court order. The legal system works slowly and people have specialized in circumventing it. Social pressure is very difficult to circumvent. > As long as there > is no proof that those drivers violate the GPL, I assume that those > drivers are indeed in compliance with the law. Again, this is how cases > are usually handled in jurisdiction as long as they are open or in > doubt. I won't dispute that proof is essential for any claim. However, I think that it has already been proven for quite a few closed source drivers that they include substantial portions of GPLed code. > If Andreas is indeed right and Debian is violating the GPL > license "but nobody will do anything about it because it is the free > community-based Linux distro" (quoting Andreas' email), then this is the > strongest argument that those kernel developers (and others) threatening > to sue companies don't primarily care about right or wrong (the legal > truth) but are interested in politics - in other words, they are only > interested in forcing companies to write open source drivers, by any > means. I fail to see the logic in your statements above. Even if somebody values legal truth higher than any political goal, he/she might still decide not to (immediately) enforce compliance with it in specific cases for various reasons: * lack of time * lack of money * more prominent cases to go after * fear of counterattacks (physical threats and litigation threats) If you feel that the reasons above are not valid for somebody seeking legal truth as primary goal, the logical conclusion would be that only persons with infinite resources and unlimited protection against any threat can elect legal truth as their number one goal. I doubt such persons exist. > Otherwise they would have to threaten and possibly sue the Debian > project as well. Here social pressure works the other way round. If anybody even suggests that Debian could be unfree, he is in for a very tough ride. However, somebody has to bite that bullet. Could as well be me. Regards, Carl-Daniel --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
