Anthony DeRobertis wrote: > olive wrote: >> Some might argue that a court will read the GFDL in a more litteral >> sense. I do not think that because it seems very obvious that the >> copyright holder of a GFDL document don't want to restrict what you do >> with your own copy. Of course I might be wrong but for every license >> there is always a risk that a juge read it in a different way; Debian >> must read the license in the most probable way. > > Debian-legal has traditionally read licenses in a more pessimistic > light; we didn't want to leave Debian — or its users — in danger of > being sued for copyright infringement.
I don't believe it's pessimistic to avoid attempting to attribute interpretations to a license which are not explicitly stated in the license itself. I don't believe that it is "very obvious that the copyright holder of a GFDL document don't want to restrict what you do with your own copy", because the license they chose explicitly does so. We don't stretch interpretations of obviously free licenses to be non-free unless the copyright holder has explicitly stated that interpretation to be true (such as UW with PINE: "oh, when we said 'and' we really meant 'or'"). Similarly, we shouldn't stretch interpretations of non-free conditions to be Free if in the absence of a clarifiation from upstream, which we don't have here. (Note that my use of the phrase "non-free conditions" does not contradict the GFDL GR, which just states that the GFDL as a whole is defined to be DFSG-free without unmodifiable sections; the individual clauses can and should still be considered non-free in any other context, and may still render works non-distributable which would make the question of defined "DFSG-free"ness irrelevant.) - Josh Triplett
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