Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.
___
License-discuss mailing list
License-discuss
under
GPL 3-or-later at any time.
What do you think of making that recommendation?
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone
this be required if not by an order for specific performance?
In the usual circumstances, we could make him stop distributing the
product unless he complies.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org
Skype: No way
between D and O not sufficient?
If not, why not?
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call
I don't know whether it is a
free software license, and if it isn't, then Tahoe-LAFS is not free
sotfware.
If you send me the text of this license, I can study it.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org
Skype: No way
-LAFS free software, regardless of what the TGPPL says.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call
giving O the right to distribute that code under the
GNU GPL starting at a future date F. Is that something O can rely on?
Is there any way for D to retract that?
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org
Skype: No way
users' freedoms, so it would not be a free software license.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call
, at that point we could recommend its use, and until then
we urge people not to use it.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone
-after-one-year. I was their attorney at the time and I fully supported
their business and licensing model. (For what it is worth, so did my
client's friend, Richard Stallman, who apparently considered this a
reasonable way then to end up with GPL software.)
That is not quite accurate. I
to practice patent P royalty-free (etc. etc.) except for the notorious
Richard Stallman. Is distribution of R still impossible because Stallman
can't use it?
Yes, it is.
The same would be true if John Cowan were substituted for Richard
Stallman. Free for everyone except you is not free
The point of the law school exam being for anyone to be able to show a
difference in people's behavior in re GPLed code versus AFL+GPLed
code. How can the licenses be said to be incompatible if the supposed
incompatibility causes no change in anyone's behavior?
The presence of
Bottom line: I can assure you, as the license author, that the AFL is
intended to be used for software that can be incorporated into
GPL-licensed software, and I will almost certainly so advise my clients:
I hope you will decide that you owe it to your clients to inform them
that the
BigCo brings Debian Linux into its research labs.
The name of that distribution is Debian GNU/Linux. (It is a version
of GNU/Linux.)
--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
The trademark clause in the AFL merely states that Neither the names of
Licensor, nor the names of any contributors to the Original Work, nor
any of their trademarks or service marks, may be used to endorse or
promote products derived from this Original Work without express prior
Under
U.S. trademark law, anyone can say I've built a derivative work of
Apache without using Apache's good name, or yours, to endorse or
promote their software.
It looks like use of Apache's good name to me. If it isn't what it
looks like, I guess these words are not clear.
The key question: If Person C who has W' sues Person A for
patent infringement, does that void his license to do things with W'?
If C sues A for patent infringement, C can no longer copy, modify or
distribute W, or W+X, or W', because his license to do those things with
W
It's called the GPL because it assigns certain rights to everyone, not because
it makes everyone (or some abstract entity called the general public)
the owner.
Legally, a GPL-covered work is copyrighted and has certain copyright
holders. For certain purposes, it makes a difference
Since the beginning, software works were placed under the protection
of Copyright Laws.
If we replace the propaganda term protection with a neutral term
such as coverage, this is a true and useful statement--because you
said copyright. If you replace copyright with intellectual
My Lord, you should re-read any Internet FAQ about list usage,
in particular, about people sending void, non-useful messages.
The propaganda term intellectual property does a lot of harm, and
explaining this problem is useful, in my opinion. Your opinion may be
different.
--
I appeal to everyone in this discussion to resist and reject the use
of the propaganda term intellectual property to label the topic now
??? - Nobody used it this way.
I was responding to this text, written by someone in this discussion
(I don't know who, but it isn't crucial).
I appeal to everyone in this discussion to resist and reject the use
of the propaganda term intellectual property to label the topic now
under discussion. It is more clear, and less biased, to describe the
topic as copyright and patents.
The term intellectual property encourages simplistic
A simple example: it is totally trivial on Windows to build a 'service'
from a DLL, exposing its entire interface. This would be running as a
separate executable, but would look like a regular library to any
windows program.
The FSF's position is that the GPL applies to any
The reason we've decided that this ASP requirement is legitimate is
that it is a matter of requiring making the modified source code
available in a case of public use. It extends existing GPL
requirements coherently to a new scenario of usage.
It would be wrong to require publication of
I think these issues should be judged by the substance of the
requirement rather than by the legal hook which is used to impose it.
For instance, a requirement to make source available to users is
substantively a requirement of distribution rather than a restriction
on use.
At present we are
So where
in the OSD, or in the GPL, do we make it clear that potentially
burdensome license requirements (however those are defined) are not
allowed?
I recommend you allow them but deprecate them. That is what we do.
We always did recognize the old BSD license as a free
Making "non authorized copies" is slavery!
If you don't have power over other people, you are a slave.
Boy, that is extreme.
Yes, I agree with RMS here. We should not call it piracy but
slavery. Unauthorized copying of intellectual capital/property
means denying the freedom of the IP holder.
No, it means denying the power of the copyright owner. Control over
your own actions is freedom. Control over the
There are other equally usable terms that do not carry the same
polemical associations with evil and violence. "Bootlegging" comes
readily to mind.
I recommend "unauthorized copying". It is a neutral, factual
description which expresses no opinion.
The image of pillaging bucanneers may be an unfortunate association,
but it is metaphorically correct.
That copyright infringement is illegal is a fact, but "piracy" doesn't
just refer to that fact. It makes a moral statement, and it is the
moral statement that I say "shame" to.
You
Which is way I also dislike the terms "slavery", "subjugation" and
"domination" in reference to closed source software. These terms also
have polemical associations with evil and violence. If one metaphor is
wrong, then so is the other.
I have little to say about closed-source
But the idea that
information can be stolen already has a strong foothold in the public
mind, even among the Free Software and Open Source movements. For
example, I have often heard that one should use a copyleft rather than
an unrestricted license so that "the source code
My understanding was that a legal entity can make private
modifications to GPL software and is allowed to keep those
modifications private,
That is our interpretation. In other words, using a copy
within the company is not distribution to others.
So, since a corporation is
I am ashamed of Eric Raymond for using the term "piracy" to describe
unauthorized copying. That word is a propaganda term, designed to
imply that unauthorized copying is the moral equivalent of attacking a
ship.
Ironically, that restriction excludes nearly all the commercial GNU/Linux
distributions. They typically include some non-free software--an
unfortunate policy--and hardly any of them fits the criterion specified
in the Motif license.
The OpenMotif
It is possible to use CORBA to do something more or less equivalent
to linking, but it is somewhat more painful. So the GPL will still
be effective, even though not 100%, even if CORBA is never considered
to make a combined program.
The situation is practically the same in many Java
The problem is, people on this list are searching for hard lines. I see
arguments like 'but if that is true, then by logical extension, every
shell script is a derived work of bash'. There are no hard lines.
'Derived work' is an important concept, but not one that can always be
This thread seems to be about giving credit to the GNU effort, while the
above statement suggest that Linus' contribution was just a snap or some
strike of luck.
That's exactly what it was. Linus was not aiming or planning to help
complete a free operating system. He wrote a kernel
This thread seems to be about giving credit to the GNU effort, while the
above statement suggest that Linus' contribution was just a snap or some
strike of luck.
That's exactly what it was. Linus was not aiming or planning to help
complete a free operating system. He wrote a kernel
Okay, then what is an operating system? The Gospel of Tux defines it as
the Kernel, the Libraries, and the Utilities,
The term "utilities" implies, to me, small programs that do certain
kinds of jobs--for example, cp and grep. I would not think of GCC or
Emacs, or the shell, or ftpd,
Finally, why should we trivialize the kernel of any OS as an "only
thing"? If kernels were so easy, one would think that GNU would
have long ago released one. But in my experience kernels are not
so easy,
I do not think the kernel is easy; I didn't intend to say so, and I'm
What I'd like to hear is some sane rationale for Richard "I just
want everybody to be free" Stallman's petty insistence that he be
allowed to name someone else's product. How free is that?
We did more to develop this system than anyone else, and so it
is natural that we should be
Is GTK part of the GNU project? I thought it was part of the GIMP
project.
GIMP is part of the GNU Project too.
This would include any embedded system, anything written exclusively
for a GUI, any daemon, anything which can use sfio (e.g. Perl),
anything written in a
Is what is "part of GNU" and what is simply "GNU-compatible" defined
explicitly somewhere?
GNU is the name of an operating system. (This is what the GNU Project
set out to develop.) Something is part of GNU if it is part of that
system.
"GNU-compatible" is not a term I use, so I don't
Cygnus gets credit for extending win32. Where's the credit for
GNU? All things considered, it should be called GNUwin32,
You make a good case for that, and I think you are right.
I care more about the "Linux" system than about Cygwin32, because
"Linux" is basically the system that the
Dammit, Richard, that's nonsense and you know it. Linux is not
what you envisioned 15 years ago.
The "Linux" system is basically the GNU system, which is the system we
started working for. To be sure, the GNU system is not entirely as I
envisioned it 15 years ago: over time, plans
AS far as I know, but that my be wrong:
The seperation came first,
then came the war,
and while the war seemd to get expensive and would last longer than
the north expected, Lincoln finaly mobilized the masses because of
"slavery".
The whole country was in a ferment about
If people have to pay per copy, then the program is not free software,
and it is also not open source software.
I do not get that.
That is part of the definition of free software: users must be allowed
to run it without having to pay for permission. That includes all
users,
I find the two quite similar actually. Cygwin32 is gcc company, bash,
and a standard set of file utilities (ls, tar, ...). From the user's
perspective, it transforms their NT system into a system where the
shells look and act just like UNIX shells.
You're talking about "the
Perhaps one service that patentbusters.org could provide is to
publicise this concept (so that companies understand it) and act
as a synchronization centre for companies that are under threat
to find companies that are likely to be next in line and convince
them to contribute
The problem is current software/e-com patents are not "inventions" but "land
grabs."
That is a part of the problem. Software patents that cover "real
inventions" are the rest of the problem.
People seem to be very reluctant to doubt that patents are a good
thing, or even to doubt that
Well, that's one point but the input can be used to file an
objection to the PTO and try to get the patent invalid.
I discussed this with lawyers years ago, as president of the LPF. I
was told that often it is a better strategy to save the prior art for
a trial (assuming the patent
You've said this before, and you've yet to convince me.
Ok, I can't win 'em all. You're entitled to your opinion. I think
the reasons are good ones and ought to convince many other people.
I do not believe you can fairly make the 'principal developer'
claim unless the project was
I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of software
developers believe that the software that they write is "theirs",
no matter who uses it.
You are probably right. And the vast majority develop proprietary
software. I developed the GPL because I disagree with the majority.
I do think that the authors of the GNU programs deserve credit for what
they've done, and that also translates into credit for the whole "GNU
System". However, it's puzzling to me why nobody's busy arguing that it
should be called GNU/Cygwin32 ...
As far as I understand it, this
Each patent has a 3 month public period were
everyone can file an objection to a published patent. It should
be trivial to show prior art to the PTO and argue about the
triviality of the filed patent.
You may not realize how much work this involves. I think that several
thousand
Since this concept of getting "credit" for software seems to be so
important, it probably should be embodied in the license.
I disagree on principle; however, even if I agreed, I see no way that
a license could be written to address the issue.
could require that collections of
The X Windows system is not a GNU program; the GNU Project
cannot claim any of the credit for developing X.
However, we decided back in the 1980s to include X in the GNU
operating system, and we began integrating the rest of the system with
it. So the GNU operating system includes X, even
Finally, why should we trivialize the kernel of any OS as an "only
thing"?
When I say that Linux is only the kernel, I am not trying to minimize
the work of writing of a kernel. I am comparing it with something of
a greater order of complexity--a whole operating system. The kernel
is
I don't understand this argument. Patents are expressly there to protect
the inventor's right to make money from a new process that is otherwise
easily copied.
The purpose of patents, at least in the US, is to promote progress.
That is stated in the US Constitution.
Whether patents
I think your analogy is precise and accurate. It also
demonstrates an irreparable flaw in your position about individual
freedom.
It isn't a flaw, it just shows that we're evaluating freedom in two
different ways and not understanding each other. I was hoping the
analogy would
You may hear people say that an operating system is normally named
after its kernel, and therefore the "Linux" operating system
should be named after its kernel.
Actually operating systems are just about never named
after their kernels. It is normally the other way around.
You may hear people
The goal
of the OSS movement is to convince people and companies that by
definition a proprietary system cannot long-term deliver the same
real benefits that OSS can. If someone is well and truly convinced
of that, then they cannot be sold a proprietary system, no matter
Balling has attributed to me
The only people (or to clarify, the FIRST person) who claimed Linux was
"part of the GNU system" was RMS.
Actually I do not say that Linux is part of the GNU system. What I
say is that the GNU/Linux system is the combination of GNU and Linux.
It is the
This is false. Or have you changed your mind about about accepting
code to support ssh in Emacs?
You are right that we don't support any and all non-free applications
in all ways. We only support some of them, in some ways.
It forces you to release all your stuff which is in someway combined
with the GNU stuff as GPL, too.
Most people prefer 'free' software where the author states: "you can do
what
ever you want provided you leave this notice intact".
...
In fact I prefer a community
Remember what Billy Shakespeare said about roses...
When you communicate using words, the words you choose determine
what message you convey.
People can find out about roses by looking at them, smelling them, and
pricking themselves with thorns. But a social activity such as the
Free
Nope. Unices have always been named after their kernel.
With all due respect, there are almost no examples of naming a system
after its kernel. It is normally the opposite: the kernel is named
after the system it was used in. Names such as SunOS, AIX, HPUX, and
Unix itself, are first of
I think that the "IP" in "OpenIP" is meant to refer to "intellectual
property". That's a term it is better to avoid; see
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html for some reasons
why.
How the heck do you get that out of a presentation that includes
John Locke, microeconomic analysis, and several million years of
human evolutionary history?
You've said many things in your carreer; I have not read your papers
recently. I'm responding to things you said earlier in
- Unpack the compressed archive using the free "miniunzip" program from
zlib-bin.
miniunzip extess.final-0.zip
Ah, I did not know about that. Thanks.
They would, if he didn't insist on saying things that puzzle and alienate
and frighten people so often.
I don't do this a tenth so much as you would encourage people to
think. As the leader of the GNU Project, most of what I do nowadays
is dealing with people--mostly hackers, but some
It's in zip format; apologies to gzip purists but
I am just way too tired to work it all right now
when I can use the Zip-O-Matic pull-down ...
At present, there is no free software which can decode it. But I
believe that the InfoZIP people are going to change the license soon.
So
You said some very insulting--and unjustifie--things to Ean.
Wake up, man. The percentage of people who can be reached by
arguments that aren't founded in selfishness is *tiny*.
There you go again, exaggerating.
I never lie.
Exaggeration is a half-truth, and a half-truth is often
I believe more hackers would rather listen to Richard than to you, Eric.
I disagree. I think both of them are worth listening to.
I think there is no need to compare, because Eric and I mostly talk
about different things.
I think Eric has had some worthwhile and insightful things to
I've always been careful to describe the Open Source movement as a
different philosophical camp, not an enemy. I think it fails to
address the most important and deepest issues, but I don't argue
against what it explicitly says.
I hope that Eric will treat the Free Software movement in an
RMS is going to live to see a world of almost entirely ``free''
software. And he's going to get it because Linus Torvalds is better
at managing developers than he is and because *I* figured out exactly
how to sweet-talk the suits into buying the freedom. We two are the
best
The true strength of free/openware will not come from
its selling point. It will come from the freedom. Even
after every ideology has come and gone, the code is
protected and will remain.
Ironically, the ideology of the Free Software movement
is very close to the point you have
I am much more concerned about the fact that Open Source accepts
an increasing variety of licenses
Actually there is just a small difference between the set of licenses
that are defined as open source and the set that we define as free
software. There is only one known case where we
If anything, GNOME is part of the "GNOME movement" - any other group
trying to take credit for it or call it their own, should reconsider
their position.
GNOME is the GNU desktop, a part of the GNU Project. Its development
was based directly on the idealism of the Free Software
A complete free operating system *of sufficiently high quality*
(not the highest possible quality, but better than Windows, anyway).
Otherwise, any old hack would have done the job.
I agree it helps a lot to have high-quality software.
But even a somewhat unreliable operating system
How do Open Source projects differ from the above?
In two very important ways. Firstly, OSPs have no
time-bound. That is, there is no deadline whereby
the next version of GNOME has to be delivered, "or
I agree entirely with your argument, but the words raise a background
issue
If an application 'A' uses a library 'B' in what might be described as an
'essential' way, then, irrespective of the physical mechanism of linkage
(static/dynamic/run-time/compile-time/corba) I would expect 'A' to be
considered as a derived work of 'A'.
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