On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 3:33 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn <[email protected]> wrote: > Felipe Contreras wrote at 00:52 (EDT): >> I'm talking about rights. As a user, I don't have any rights, only >> privileges granted by the developer. > > This is where I disagree, in principle. While you're technically > correct that the "rights" of copyright law stay with the copyright > holder, the GPL is clearly designed to pass rights and privileges > along to each who receives distribution.
It doesn't matter how the GPL was designed, the GPL doesn't have precedence over the law, and the law doesn't allow a software license to change the nature of copyright law. > That's a philosophical disagreement. I don't believe that copyright > holders have some special rights above users -- I believe they should > get equal rights to source code and the ability to modify it. And I believe differently, and so do a lot of people, which is why we have the law that we have. >> My point still stands; my rights (developer rights), are not being >> eroded in the least. > > This point has some truth to it, but only in a very narrow sense. I can sue any copyright infringes any time I want, and there's no change in the law in sight that will prevent me to do so. > Felipe, I don't know if we're doing value to this list by continuing > this thread. I think all the positions that everyone has have been made > clear. This thread has been going off and on since February. I think > it's time we ended it. What do you think? I believe I've said to you all I can say, but it still looks like you think the desires of certain people have precedence over the law, namely; that the _intent_ of the GPL is what matters, where in fact, what matters is what the law allows, and what the law allows is there because there's plenty of people that disagree with your "philosophical disagreement", including me. Once you accept that your philosophical opinion (or the one of the FSF) is not relevant for matters of law, then it follows that users don't have rights, and GPL can't give them such rights... not unless the law is changed, and that won't happen as long as there's people like me, or even worst, that disagree with you. Therefore, users have no rights, they have privileges, and developers that don't enforce the GPLv2, are not eroding the rights. That is the case *right now*, I wish you could agree on that. About the future, and what should be the ideal, we should agree to disagree. Cheers. -- Felipe Contreras _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list [email protected] http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
