On Saturday 08 July 2006 08:21, Adam Kennedy wrote:
> > From my interpretation, what he said was "I don't care to understand
> > licenses enough so I don't want to be bothere with it." Now I think this
> > is a rather small-minded approach to this issue, which I think is very
> > bad. Perhaps, the response to Ovid about it instead of this message was
> > not appropriate, or I may have misunderstood what Ovid said.
>
> ...
>
> > What I did claim that people who refuse to understand the various common
> > open source licences and when it is appropriate to use one of them, are
> > acting small-mindedly (or "small-headedly") in this context.
>
> For the record, I refuse to understand the various common open source
> licenses, and when it is appropriate to use one of them.
>
> So instead, for the win32.perl.org logo and the Strawberry Perl license
> bundling issues, even though I don't see a problem, on the advice of
> Randal and Allison I've asked to pass on the details of both issues to
> the TPF Intellectual Property lawyers for revue, and I've been lucky
> enough that I've been allowed to burn a few hours of their time on this
> issue.
>
> I may be ignorant, but I'm not naive, and I know it matters. But I
> shouldn't have to put in the effort to learn this stuff.
>
> And most of the people here are the same. They remain ignorant, not
> because they don't care, but because they prefer to defer to others who
> DO understand more than we ever could.
>
> This does not make them small-minded at all, just pragmatic.
>
Fair enough. I prefer to be both knowledgable and pragmatic. I.e: hope I
understand when something is legal, but also perhaps have to consult lawyers
when in doubt.
I should also note that licences such as the GPL are often mis-understood or
can have various grey areas by anyone (including some lawyers). For example,
recently after Solaris became OpenSolaris under a free software but
non-GPL-compatible licence, some people wanted to start a Debian GNU/Solaris
distribution. However, some people in Debian told them that the GPLed code in
Debian could not be linked with the OpenSolaris standard libraries (libc,
libm, etc.) that were non-GPL compatible.
Obviously this is non-sense, because it was perfectly legal to build and
distribute the binaries for the various GPLed GNU programs for Solaris and
other proprietary Unixes (and MS Windows, too) before they became open
source, because the GPL allow it. But still a concern was raised.
My wiki page was not aimed at anyone personally - I was just trying to set up
a good resource to better educate people about it. It's not a replacement for
consulting with a lawyer on various fine points, but it can help to better
understand the surrounding issues, and also make better decisions.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Homepage: http://www.shlomifish.org/
95% of the programmers consider 95% of the code they did not write, in the
bottom 5%.
