Re: Changing a license of a unmaintained software

2003-09-06 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Scott James Remnant [EMAIL PROTECTED]: A signature made with a secret key that was published on Usenet can hardly be a valid proof of anything. In some countries like in France it's truly accepted in court like a valid proof, you just have to follow some rules. I don't think the

Re: Changing a license of a unmaintained software

2003-09-06 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Scott James Remnant [EMAIL PROTECTED]: As far as know, almost anything is acceptable in a UK court as valid proof, apart from a few stupid exceptions, such as hearsay. Not true, the UK has a set of rules as to what constitutes sufficient authority to be bound by the contents of a

Re: Changing a license of a unmaintained software

2003-09-06 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Scott James Remnant [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Electronic Communications Act 2000 7. - (1) In any legal proceedings- (a) an electronic signature incorporated into or logically associated with a particular electronic communication or particular electronic data, and

Re: Some licensing questions regarding celestia

2003-09-04 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Brian C [EMAIL PROTECTED]: If so, I can say with certainty that the FSF claims that the GPL is not a contract. I attended their recent seminar on the GPL at Stanford Law School (August '03 See http://patron.fsf.org/course-offering.html ) and heard presentations from Exec. Director Bradley

Re: UnrealIRCd License (Click-Through issue)

2003-09-01 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Mika Fischer [EMAIL PROTECTED]: The main issue for the developers is AFAIK the no warranty clause and how to make it legally binding. I'm not really sure what it means to make a no warranty clause legally binding. If you are trying to avoid getting sued then you might be better off if you make

Re: A possible GFDL compromise

2003-09-01 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
MJ Ray [EMAIL PROTECTED]: To accuse someone of accusing someone of dishonesty is pretty serious, too. He was probably in a hurry and misunderstood. A polite correction would do. There's no need to start accusing RMS of accusing people of accusing him of dishonesty, not that I want to accuse

Re: UnrealIRCd License (Click-Through issue)

2003-09-01 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Mika Fischer [EMAIL PROTECTED]: 5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. And what does that mean? May I download Emacs, not accept the GPL, use it, run into problems with my business because of using it and then sue the FSF? Of course. You have the

Re: UnrealIRCd License (Click-Through issue)

2003-09-01 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Mika Fischer [EMAIL PROTECTED]: The whole point of my hypothetical example is that I don't accept the license and use the software nevertheless. How could the GPL then be of any help? People don't have to accept the GPL unless they are redistributing. I would guess that the GPL helps because,

Re: The GPL and you

2003-08-31 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Daniel Isacc Walker [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I made a PHP extension for the talkfilters library. It's not a big achievement, it's maybe 100-200 lines of code .. I've run into a license problem . PHP is under the PHP license and the talkfilters library is under the GPL .

Re: A possible GFDL compromise

2003-08-27 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Brian T. Sniffen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: But the FSF is exploiting its monopoly position with regard to Emacs to do things which it does not permit further distributors to do. The Emacs manual claims to be part of Emacs, but only the FSF, as the copyright holder of both works, can distribute a

Re: SUN RPC code is DFSG-free

2003-08-26 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Anthony Towns aj@azure.humbug.org.au: You're invited to demonstrate an instance of someone coming up with the exact same expression of the exact same copyrightable idea being sued for copyright infringement and winning on the grounds of independent reinvention. For bonus points make it an

Re: A possible approach in solving the FDL problem

2003-08-14 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Peter S Galbraith [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I agree with you. I'm also afraid that the next release of the GPL won't mean what the current one does. I'm also afraid that the FSF will sacrifice it in the name of some exchange. If that happens I pity all those that have license their with the words

EBCDIC (WAS: Re: a minimal copyleft)

2003-08-08 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Andrew Suffield [EMAIL PROTECTED]: EBCDIC is not a subset of ASCII, I'm pretty sure. Any translation is going to be lossy. IIRC, aside from the control codes (which are virtually unused anyway, and thusly not an issue) it is. If you look at the top left-hand corner of a British computer

Re: a minimal copyleft

2003-08-05 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Andrew Suffield [EMAIL PROTECTED]: The GPL doesn't say the original author's preferred form for modifications, and that's not an error. It doesn't need to; this is implicit in the nature of copyright law. The license comes from the copyright holder, so it's their preference which

Re: a minimal copyleft

2003-08-05 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Anthony DeRobertis [EMAIL PROTECTED]: reasonable help is very unclear, and has no time limit on it. Am I compelled to answer emails about it for the rest of eternity? Because of the exponential decay in interest, answering e-mails for 3 years is probably about 80% of the work of answering

a minimal copyleft

2003-08-03 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
The following has little to do with Debian, but it is related to how documentation should be licensed, which was discussed here recently. I was recently asked to suggest a licence for some course material (explanations, exercises, etc) that would allow people to adapt and reuse the material and

Re: Transfer of copyright on death

2003-07-15 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Andrew Stribblehill [EMAIL PROTECTED]: The sole maintainer collaborated with another author in writing the program, and they have joint copyright. He would like to get it relicenced under a standard licence but the other author has now died. Is there any way to get it changed? I would guess

Re: Unicode Character Database

2003-07-09 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Branden Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED]: http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200211/msg00304.html ...in which Edmund Grimley Evans says it's free. Edmund Grimley Evans YES That YES should be attributed to Thomas Bushnell rather than me. I don't think it's free, though

Re: Debian and copyrights

2003-07-01 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Matthew Palmer [EMAIL PROTECTED]: If the author had accepted patches from others to version 1, he would be stuck with keeping later versions under the GPL unless he got a licence change OK'd by each of the contributors, or removed the contributed code. However, check the licence on the

Re: Debian and copyrights

2003-06-30 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Henning Makholm [EMAIL PROTECTED]: 2. You're the author and want to prevent *yourself* from switching to a non-free license in the future. Hmm? The best way would be to decide not to do it, and then have the strength of character to stick to your decision. However, you might be

Re: Debian and copyrights

2003-06-30 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Baptiste SIMON [EMAIL PROTECTED]: we are in this situation... and I want to prevent changin license by holder of the copyright. So I'm looking for a solution, giving the copyright to something, under some terms, etc... Is there any solution ? If you want advice about setting up a trust,

Re: Defining 'preferred form for making modifications'

2003-06-25 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
People don't edit program binaries usually, so let's take a realistic example: I produce a bidirectional bilingual dictionary using some Perl scripts that automatically generate LaTeX source for both sides of the dictionary from a marked up version of one direction. However, just before going to

Re: [RFC] Modification history as a source code

2003-06-17 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Dmitry Borodaenko [EMAIL PROTECTED]: even to its creator, 'form preferred for modification' should be chosen from forms remaining in existence. You shouldn't be choosing at all. You should provide everything that is likely to be useful. For example, if you automatically converted a Pascal

Re: Source Code of Music (was: various opinions on Debian vs the GFDL)

2003-06-04 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Thomas Uwe Gruettmueller [EMAIL PROTECTED]: You have a similar but less severe problem if A is a high-precision digital recording (with lots of random noise in the low bits) and D is a compressed version: clearly A is source of D, I would argue that D is an excerpt of A. If someone

Re: GDB manual

2003-06-01 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Richard Stallman [EMAIL PROTECTED]: What about the entire set of comments on the draft version of the GFDL? [1] There was never a response to any of those comments. When people ask for explanation of a license, we try to answer in order to help them out. Criticism and demands are a

Re: ISO 3166 copyright

2003-05-29 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Branden Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Bah, there's no copyright in those lists; just like there's no copyright in the listings of the phone book. Please attack and destroy people with _Feist v. Rural Telephone Service Co._[1]. [1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/499_US_340.htm

Re: PHP-Nuke License Conclusion?

2003-05-21 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Nick Phillips [EMAIL PROTECTED]: As I said before: when the GNU GPL says this License and herein, these terms are not variables. They are constants. They always and forever will refer to the terms and conditions laid out within the same document. Perhaps GPLv3 should solve this

Re: caml-light licence question.

2003-05-14 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Sven Luther [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I am trying to package caml-light which comes with the attached licence. My understanding of it is that it is not distributable by debian, since it allow distribution of modified works only as pristine source + patches, not binaries, and i will be going to

Re: caml-light licence question.

2003-05-14 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Sven Luther [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I am trying to package caml-light which comes with the attached licence. A brief addendum to my previous reply: the non-free package qmail-src might be a good model to follow as qmail has a similar restriction in its licence. Edmund

Re: Source Code of Music (was: various opinions on Debian vs the GFDL)

2003-05-13 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Thomas Uwe Gruettmueller [EMAIL PROTECTED]: So the problem here is that the source code of sample data is more sample data. These samples might again require their sources, and so the resulting tree could be enormous. When distributing the source, you don't have to distribute the whole

Re: [OT] Droit d'auteur vs. free software?

2003-05-13 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Dylan Thurston [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Whatever you may think of the specific merits of the droit d'auteur system, please bear in mind that every legal system gives you rights you cannot barter away. For instance, no modern legal system lets you sell yourself into slavery, and I think that that

Re: [OT] Droit d'auteur vs. free software?

2003-05-13 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Arnoud Galactus Engelfriet [EMAIL PROTECTED]: So what you do to works I created could harm my reputation. I could make a silly modificaton to your painting and avoid mentioning that you created the original. This wouldn't harm your reputation. Alternatively I could create a totally original

Re: motion to take action on the unhappy GNU FDL issue

2003-05-12 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Branden Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED]: If you feel your trust has been betrayed, I think you should say so. Insisting that your text be removed from the CPP manual is not the only tactic at your disposal. Certainly. If Zack were to ask for his own work (whose copyright is assigned to the FSF) to

Re: [OT] Droit d'auteur vs. free software?

2003-05-12 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
I understand that Adolf Hitler's copyright in Mein Kampf was acquired by the state of Bavaria, who use it for suppressing the book. If and when the copyright expires (2015 if the duration is not further extended; in many EU countries copyright was extended from 50 to 70 years in 1995, with the

Re: [OT] Droit d'auteur vs. free software?

2003-05-10 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Henning Makholm [EMAIL PROTECTED]: He cannot do that. But his action of releasing the work under a free license will have the coincidental effect that it becomes impossible to violate the artistic integrity of the work, because the integrity consists exactly in the work being free. I'm not

Re: Bug#189164: libdbd-mysql-perl uses GPL lib, may be used by GPL-incompatible apps

2003-05-08 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Anthony DeRobertis [EMAIL PROTECTED]: However, you could certainly distribute P on its own if you could reasonably claim that P is useful without GPLLib. I'll further argue that P is not based upon GPLLib in any meaningful manner; it includes absolutely no part of GPLLib. If P is

Re: LPPL and non-discrimination

2003-05-08 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Branden Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Substantial modifications are permitted, and may be distributed, at which point the modifier must either pay to ABC Software Inc the sum of USD 1,000 for each occurrence of distribution by the modifier, or grant to ABC Software Inc a permanent,

Re: Bug#189164: libdbd-mysql-perl uses GPL lib, may be used by GPL-incompatible apps

2003-05-07 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Anthony DeRobertis [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Given: 1) Library GPLLib is under the GPL 2) Perl module Iface provides an interface to various implementations of similar features, and the user selects which implementation to use 3) Perl modules PM uses GPLLib to

Re: [OT] Droit d'auteur vs. free software?

2003-05-02 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Henning Makholm [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Stupidity does not create rights. (Opposite in some other parts of the world where one can become rich simply by being too stupid to imagine that coffee might be hot). Punitive damages are a stupid concept (does any country other than the USA have them?) but

Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the FDL

2003-05-01 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Stephane Bortzmeyer [EMAIL PROTECTED]: In any event, if non-common law countries have legal frameworks that technically render Free Software as conceived by the FSF and the Debian Project impossible, Pure FUD. See my rebuke of Nathanael Nerode's message that I just sent. I think the

Re: [OT] Droit d'auteur vs. free software? (Was: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the FDL

2003-04-30 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Stephane Bortzmeyer [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Differences: as far as free software is concerned, the big difference between the two systems seems to be that, under the Droit d'auteur, the author has a moral right which can *not* be waived or granted to anyone else. We already have OT in the

Re: [OT] Droit d'auteur vs. free software? (Was: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the FDL

2003-04-30 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Stephane Bortzmeyer [EMAIL PROTECTED]: We already have OT in the subject, so may I ask whether this moral right ceases with the death of the author, For non-software, it was 50 years after the death of the author, it is now 70 (corporations lobbied a lot for that). For software, I'm not

Re: work with GPL and GPL with extra note

2003-04-28 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Brian M. Carlson [EMAIL PROTECTED]: .\ The GNU General Public License's references to object code .\ and executables are to be interpreted as the output of any .\ document formatting or typesetting system, including .\ intermediate and printed output. The second paragraph is what I am most

Re: Legal questions about some GNU Emacs files

2003-04-28 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Alex Romosan [EMAIL PROTECTED]: WHY-FREE is not documentation! it is a manifesto in which rms expounds on his views on free software. It doesn't really matter whether it's documentation or not. The question is, is it free? it's _his_ opinion and as such it should not be altered. However,

Re: plagiarism of reiserfs by Debian

2003-04-22 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Glenn Maynard [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Well, doesn't the GPL say something on it being illegal to impose additional restrictions on distribution? If the restriction is agreed upon by all copyright holders, then the issue is murky; as far as I know, there's no consensus on this issue on

Re: Suggestion to maintainers of GFDL docs

2003-04-22 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
A Microsoft Word document is probably source code rather than object code: people do edit Microsoft Word documents, and people don't usually do automatic translations into Microsoft Word format (though they do sometimes, for example when exporting from another word processor). Anyway, I don't

Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the FDL

2003-04-21 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Leonardo Boselli [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I add some notes on italian author rigfhts law: the right to integrity of work is -except for some works- inalienable. I wonder what that means in the case of a work with several authors and no identification of who wrote (and edited) each paragraph. So a

Re: Bug#189164: libdbd-mysql-perl uses GPL lib, may be used by GPL-incompatible apps

2003-04-21 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Anthony DeRobertis [EMAIL PROTECTED]: If you think that is a creation of a derivative work (and thus violates the GPL), then I have a much bigger GPL violation for you to worry about. It's with an interpreter known as bash. Another example is the Linux kernel and GPL-incompatible programs

Re: Debian Free Software License?

2003-04-17 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Joerg Wendland [EMAIL PROTECTED]: is there anything like a Debian Free Software License? A license that is modelled after the DFSG? For me as free software developer, that would be a nice to have. I couldn't find a discussion about something similar in the list archives. Is this worth a

Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL

2003-04-16 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Although I have said it before, I'll say it again: I don't consider the GFDL to be perfect, but from the free documentation licenses I have seen so far, it seems to be the most solid one for the reasons I've described. What do you mean by a free

Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the FDL

2003-04-14 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED]: As to the question whether or not software and documentation should be treated alike, I'd like to say that I am very much in favor of a more differentiated approach. Mixing things that are in truth very different is one of the worst effects of the

Re: License with the following characteristics?

2003-03-31 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Nathanael Nerode [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I'm thinking of licensing a program under the GPL, but I dislike the FSF's overly restrictive concept that 'dynamic linking is modification'. I want my program (and any derivative works) to be allowed to use *accurately documented and published*

Re: The Show So Far

2003-03-17 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Jeremy Hankins [EMAIL PROTECTED]: But despite the above I do want to point out that the argument about the only thing stopping the possessor can easily (and, IMHO, more justifiably) be used against the GPL and in favor of BSD-style licensing. Simply s/possessor/possessor of source/ to see

Re: JpGraph License Question [From the author]

2003-03-16 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
JpGraph [EMAIL PROTECTED]: My goal with some kind of license setup for JpGraph is I'm not a lawyer and cannot give legal advice. The obvious thing to do is to license the library under the GPL to everyone and offer an alternative non-free licence to companies that want to use it as part of a

Re: OSD DFSG - different purposes - constructive suggestion!

2003-03-09 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Thomas Bushnell, BSG [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Now you're saying that we must be nice and polite to the PRC. Let's all be friends! (And not pay attention to the people crushed by the tanks.) I remember Tianenmen Square; it seems that the world has mostly forgotten. Worse things have happened

Re: The Helixcommunity RPSL is not DFSG-free

2003-03-02 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Personally I'm really worried about the case where astronomers prove the existence of intelligent life in another solar system, but free software developers lack the resources to make their patches available to them and therefore cannot deploy modifications to the software.

revocability of licences

2003-02-10 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
I'm not sure that revocability of free software licences really is a problem. However, if it is, this might help: Free software authors and contributors could sell distribution rights for their work with a contract something like the following. | Contract made between name of free software

Re: CLUEBAT: copyrights, infringement, violations, and legality

2003-01-29 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Branden Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED]: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights[0], adopted by the United Nations in 1948, lists many other rights commonly thought of as natural rights or civil rights. You'll note that the terms copyright, trademark, and patent do not even appear

Re: EULA with GPL??

2002-12-17 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Anthony DeRobertis [EMAIL PROTECTED]: As for relevance to Debian, can one assume that the GPL absolutely guarantees DFSG free? (As I'm pretty sure the DFSG *does* guarantee me this right). No. Patents can get in your way. We have GPL software (e.g., gimp-nonfree, due to Unisys patents

Re: Is this a free license?

2002-12-13 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Thomas Bushnell, BSG [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Microsoft takes a bunch away, with the case of qmail, you *didn't* purchase anything, and you have no rights to copy *anything*--to even *get* the first copy--except under the terms of the license. Do all download sites force you to read the licence

Re: Is this a free license?

2002-12-13 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Thomas Bushnell, BSG [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Arguing from common sense here, consider the case of someone who knows C but doesn't know English. It would seem very unfair for them to be punished merely for downloading the tar ball, editing the code, compiling it and running it. If that's

Re: Is this a free license?

2002-12-13 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Thomas Bushnell, BSG [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Arguing from common sense here, consider the case of someone who knows C but doesn't know English. It would seem very unfair for them to be punished merely for downloading the tar ball, editing the code, compiling it and running it.

Re: EULAs and the DFSG

2002-12-04 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Martin Wuertele [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Besides that there are countries like Austria where click-through licenses are not legally binding. It's not clear to me whether you're talking about a web page that asks you to agree to some terms before downloading the software, or a program that asks you

Re: EULAs and the DFSG

2002-12-04 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
I'm trying to think of a vaguely plausible use for an EULA with free software ... Suppose you want to force people to publish the source when they use the software to drive a publicly accessible web server. This condition would still be DFSG-free, I think, but you can't enforce it with a pure

Re: EULAs and the DFSG

2002-12-04 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Mark Rafn [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Suppose you want to force people to publish the source when they use the software to drive a publicly accessible web server. I think it would be unfree, and probably even undistributable by Debian in non-free (we're not going to require an EULA to receive a

Re: License DSFG-free?

2002-12-03 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Brian M. Carlson [EMAIL PROTECTED]: |You can do whatever you like with this package. The code is placed |at the public domain. Public domain is free. One manpage calls it something like the only true free. Indeed. |This package is distributed in a hope it will be useful, but

Re: location of UnicodeData.txt

2002-11-28 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]: The problem is, every character in Unicode, all 70,000 of them, has a distinct set of properties. UnicodeData.txt is basically a listing of those properties. If it is a copyrightable work, I see no way for a text processing program to conform to Unicode

Re: Linux kernel complete licence check, Q.0 - Q.10

2002-11-21 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Thomas Bushnell, BSG [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I think the point is that copyright as a verb only makes sense in a historical, USA context. Most countries have never had a requirement or even a possiblity of registering things for copyright, as I understand it. The OED lists copyright as a

Re: Linux kernel complete licence check, Q.0 - Q.10

2002-11-19 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
I think the point is that copyright as a verb only makes sense in a historical, USA context. Most countries have never had a requirement or even a possiblity of registering things for copyright, as I understand it. Edmund

Re: Bug#168589: ITP: xfuse - a ZX Spectrum and TC2048 emulator

2002-11-12 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]: You forgot to mention: * The lack of source. That can probably be worked around: As I said elsewhere, they can't make it available, because they no longer have it (um, I can't seem to find where I read that, so I might Sorry, I didn't realise

Re: kernel driver module with proprietary closed source piece.

2002-11-06 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
I'm not an expert, but I hope my thoughts are helpful. Sven Luther [EMAIL PROTECTED]: There is a problem though, the current module contains code they control plus a piece of proprietary code implementing a software ADSL decoder or somethign such, which they don't have the sources for. It

Re: kernel driver module with proprietary closed source piece.

2002-11-06 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Sven Luther [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Wemm, but the driver minus the user space thingy is GPLed, and can be distributed with a standard kernel, and there is no breach of the GPL as long as nobody use it, right ? The same thing would apply if you simply moved the proprietary part into a separate

Re: Aspell-en license Once again.

2002-11-06 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Joe Moore [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Would the resulting list of words be a new creation, unencumbered by any license attached to the spell-checker ? ;-) No, this would be a derivative work of the Usenet postings, which are copyright their authors. You'd have to get permission from all Usenet

Re: kernel driver module with proprietary closed source piece.

2002-11-06 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Sven Luther [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I think there is general consensus that splitting stuff into separate components, distributed separately, is not a valid way of bypassing the GPL. If you distribute stuff whose only plausible purpose is to Well, if it is separated and there is a public api

Re: off-topic discussion about permissions and promises

2002-11-03 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Henning Makholm [EMAIL PROTECTED]: The way I read the GPL it is clearly a promise: I promise that *if* you agree to my conditions about, e.g., not demanding an NDA from people you distribute the code to, *then* - and not before - I will give you my permission to copy. Yet another problem

off-topic discussion about permissions and promises

2002-11-01 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Henning Makholm [EMAIL PROTECTED]: My point exactly. A typical free software licence does not constrain the future behaviour of the licenser. It's not a promise. My point is that it *is* a promise: By licencing my work under GPL, I promise to the world at large that anyone who subjects

Re: ldp-es_20002103-7_i386.changes REJECTED

2002-10-31 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Henning Makholm [EMAIL PROTECTED]: There's a school of thought that says that an old free licence *can* be retracted in common-law countries, because of the consideration theory which basically says that unilateral promises cannot be enforced against the person making the promise. I have

Re: ldp-es_20002103-7_i386.changes REJECTED

2002-10-31 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Steve Langasek [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I have heard of this principle in the context of contract law, but a licence isn't a contract. And what is it if not a contract? I don't know. Anyone? Also, I find the idea of a licence being enforced against the licencer somewhat odd. It's not as if

Re: ldp-es_20002103-7_i386.changes REJECTED

2002-10-29 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña [EMAIL PROTECTED]: If we are going to be nitpicky about this, take into account that *for each translation* in Debian (including manpages, GNOME/KDE help documentation or whatever) we *need* a document stating that a given translation is authorised *even* if the

Re: LZW patented file left in .orig.tar source package?

2002-10-25 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Branden Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Debian should not be shipping -- in source or binary form -- anything in main that isn't DFSG-free, because unless we make a good-faith effort to ensure that everyting in main is DFSG-free, our users cannot make a good-faith assumption that they can

Re: LZW patented file left in .orig.tar source package?

2002-10-25 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
David Turner [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Looking at it from a larger viewpoint, the idea that merely distributing source code and saying, don't use this gets around patent law is fairly silly. Not really. Particularly if in fact no one is using that part of the code distributed by Debian. The only

Re: LZW patented file left in .orig.tar source package?

2002-10-23 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
I know nothing about patent law, US or otherwise, but I keep seeing programs that are made freely available as source code, but not as binaries, because they implement patented algorithms. In most cases the intention is obviously that people will download the source, compile it and use it. If that

Re: [aspell-devel] Problems with aspell-en license

2002-10-21 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
John Goerzen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I'd like to say that I hope that it is the case that these are un-copyrightable, but as of yet your arguments based on law don't seem convincing. I think ordinary, internationally recognised copyright applies to artistic works, which a word list isn't. However,

Re: eawpats license [was: Timidity-patches eek]

2002-09-11 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
J.B. Nicholson-Owens [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I release these patches as fameware. If you use them in any non-private way, give me credit. These patches are not to be sold for profit (heaven forbid). They were free when I got them and so they shall remain. Here's where my problem lies:

Re: Debian registered by a trade as TM in Spain!

2002-09-06 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
We [CEINTEC] know that this person has never oposed to the use of Debian and, of course, that person guarantees that this won't happen in the future (while the GNU philosophy is respected). I don't this this guarantee is worth the paper it's printed on. We [CEINTEC] also know that he/she

Re: Bug#158529: vcg does not have a usable license

2002-09-01 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Thomas Bushnell, BSG [EMAIL PROTECTED]: No, no, no. The preferred form is the preferred form for the author, for *anyone*. It's what I would want to have, it's the real, actual, genuine source. The preferred form is found by considering the *actual* forms which exist--and seeing which

Re: Bad license on VCG?

2002-08-31 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
If you took the obfuscated code, did your best to unobfuscate it by applying both automatic reformating and manual editing, and then made some functional changes in it, or even non-functional changes, such as adding comments, I think you could then claim that what you have created is now the

Re: Bad license on VCG?

2002-08-31 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Nick Phillips [EMAIL PROTECTED]: You're the one amending selected from those forms which are available to you. The GPL *doesn't say that*. Maybe it's your definition of source, but it's not the GPL's. I knew someone would come up with that. There is however no other reasonable

Re: [Fwd: Re: Watercolor-theme for Metacity]

2002-08-25 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Mark Howard [EMAIL PROTECTED]: A last point to mention is, that the original theme is based on a Microsoft XP build 2410 look called Watercolor - this could be a licensing-problem. I think the only way to solve this, is to contact Microsoft and ask them for their permission Maybe you

Re: aspell-nl license

2002-08-19 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
As far as aspell-nl is concerned, we just have to assume that the word list might be covered by copyright in at least some countries, so we need a proper licence for it. However, since a general discussion of word list copyright seems to have ensued, what I don't understand is what happens if you

Re: aspell-nl license

2002-08-19 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Arnoud Galactus Engelfriet [EMAIL PROTECTED]: If the other person's word list is protected by copyright, and you used that as a basis for your dictionary, you're making a derived work. That doesn't automatically follow. You're begging the question. Edmund

Re: New Sun's documentation license

2002-08-17 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
As U.S. law becomes increasingly hostile to free software development, we may need to revisit that interpretation. Maybe, but the choice of law stuff is only there for settling certain kinds of dispute. Strange how the licenses that use choice-of-law provisions never bother to

Re: New Sun's documentation license

2002-08-16 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Branden Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED]: As U.S. law becomes increasingly hostile to free software development, we may need to revisit that interpretation. Maybe, but the choice of law stuff is only there for settling certain kinds of dispute. The fact that an activity is illegal in country X

Re: defining distribution (Re: A few more LPPL concerns)

2002-07-22 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Jeff Licquia [EMAIL PROTECTED]: When I execute a program, this is not a distribution. When I allow others to execute it, I distribute it -- even if there is no actual copying of bits between magnetic media. Actually, it's not clear that this is true. For example, technically a CD

Re: forwarded message from Jeff Licquia

2002-07-18 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Henning Makholm [EMAIL PROTECTED]: telnetd is a set of machine-language instructions. It doesn't actually have any capabilities to do anything. This misses the point entirely so I'll try stating it another way. latex essentially runs in a virtual machine provided by tex the program.

Re: anyone up for a project?

2002-06-28 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
To me it looks like most of this stuff is not a GPL-violation, because the firmware, although it is bundled with the kernel source, is not linked with it: the relationship between kernel and firmware is more like the relationship between editor and text being edited. However, the stuff is

OT: extracting a public-domain part from an anthology

2002-06-17 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Joe Moore [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Ah, here's an analogy that makes sense. Consider software that is an anthology of works by several authors under several licenses. Clearly the compliling (not in the software sense) author has performed significant work. However, the license for the anthology

Re: forbidding later version of GPL for xsoldier

2002-06-11 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Glenn Maynard [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Clause 9 seems pretty straightforward: if the copyright holder has decided to allow it, you can use later versions of the license for his code. It doesn't say that if he has given permission to allow this, you can freely remove this permission from forks. It

Re: GPLed software and OpenSSL

2002-05-29 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Steve Langasek [EMAIL PROTECTED]: One solution to the problem, assuming that most of the violations are in non-us, would be to not generate ISOs with non-us on them. This is practical now that crypto-in-main is done. At least in theory, then, OpenSSL (which is in main) would be

Re: Crown copyright and bible-kjv

2002-05-23 Thread Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS
Still no answer to the question, but a couple of new references: http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1988/Ukpga_19880048_en_1.htm The Copyright Act 1988 doesn't mention the Bible, though it does mention Peter Pan, in Schedule 6. http://www.cni.org/Hforums/cni-copyright/1996-02/0463.html This

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