I think Humberto is correct in his analysis of what makes something derivative. By the logic of that analysis though, reiserfs can be distributed even if it is licensed differently from the rest of the kernel because it is not derivative of it (It can be ported to other operating systems, and was created with the intention of performing such porting. I did not expect Linux to be effective in earning money relative to sales to OS companies like Sun way back in 1993 when we started, and Linux was not intended to be the primary income source for Namesys.....). By his legally correct analysis, that the kernel all gets linked together is not relevant.
However, it is also important to understand when a stance is morally and logically correct but not effective due to being beyond the herd's understanding. It is also important to understand one's priorities, and carefully choose which fights one will struggle hard enough at to win despite difficulty. I sense that free software has become institutionalized, and has grown beyond the point where diversity can be tolerated by its institutions. Innovation in licensing is now verbotten. Free expression and creativity is anathema to those trying to coalesce into coherent herd thought. Richard has indicated that he views my license as being free software (but GPL incompatible), and said that the GPL restrains changes to credits in some ways also, but Debian seems to be growing beyond Richard which is a pity in some ways. To create a license better than the GPL for your product, is like having unshined shoes when fighting on the front lines. Sure, it makes you less likely to be shot by the enemy if your shoes are unshined, but this can be outweighed in importance by the persons to your rear who don't really comprehend much about frontlines fighting technique, and really care about your shoes being shiny like theirs quite enough to stop you from getting food and ammo unless you do it. Debian's efforts to make licensing into inflexible dogma are bad, based on a lack of understanding of the tradeoffs inherent in licensing, and deserve opposition. However, in all teams there is a need to give ground even when one is right, and fighting Microsoft is my priority much more than fighting Debian. If Debian offers to provide credits in practice but not theory, and there is some possibility of getting into a debian installer in the near future, then I can probably lose a little and risk a little and put both progs and kernel code into GPL V2 for now despite it being a license with flaws that beg for fixing. I will sidestep the GFDL vs. XFree86 style vs. GPLV2 docs issue by making GPL V2 docs that consist of a URL to our website. Vitaly, see to that, and make sure we have good docs on our website.... That solution should make everyone except the users happy. Sigh. GFDL would be better, but I don't want to deal with that fight.... Debian has done many wonderful things for Linux users. Licensing is not one of them, but still I am grateful for the other things, and consider them much more important. Peace be with you, Hans
