Scripsit Glenn Maynard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > On Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 03:14:48PM -0600, Steve Greenland wrote:
> > But the original question was about djbdns-installer, Oops. Didn't catch the "-installer" at first. My fault. > But can Debian distribute the patch itself? Bernstein writes on <http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html>: | According to the CONTU Final Report, which is generally interpreted | by the courts as legislative history, ``the right to add features to | the program that were not present at the time of rightful | acquisition'' falls within the owner's rights of modification under | section 117. | | Note that, since it's not copyright infringement for you to apply a | patch, it's also not copyright infringement for someone to give you | a patch. [...] | Once you've legally downloaded a program, you can compile it. You | can run it. You can modify it. You can distribute your patches for | other people to use. Even though I don't buy his arguments (if the patch is a context or unified diff, it can very reasonably be considered a work derived from the original source and thus fall under the original author's copyright), I think we can safely take those passages as an indication that Bernstein personally allows patches to be distributed. > (After reading the random attacks on the above link, I don't care to > read anything else written by that person at the moment.) Take care not to follow the above link, then. I trimmed my quote carefully so as not to endanger the mental health of the -legal readership too much, but to do this trimming I had to read some sentences where he talks about "free software" as if he had any idea what that means. I will now need to go outside and scream and possibly bang my head into a wall a few times. -- Henning Makholm "Fuck Lone."
