>>> That's why I would love to see something definitive from the FSF >> I don't think I'd trust something from the FSF; they appear to be >> somewhat out of touch with copyright reality. For example, I've >> seen it reported that they appears to believe their license can bind >> code not covered by it - the example I saw was an open-source >> project which had hooks to interface to something GPLed, which they >> ripped out because the FSF told them it meant the whole thing had to >> be GPLed. > I suspect you're (or someone else is) misquoting someone. They > likely said "it would mean their whole program would need to be > distributed under the terms of the GPL".
Right. Which, I believe, is simply _wrong_. I went and dug it out. The program in question is Ghostscript. Here's the quote from the doc: | AFPL Ghostscript does not include an interface to GNU readline. A user | contributed code for this purpose, which we spent significant time debugging | and then updating to track internal architectural changes in Ghostscript. | The contributor was willing to assign the copyright to Aladdin Enterprises | (the copyright holder of Ghostscript at the time), and to allow the code to | be distributed with the Aladdin Free Public License (AFPL) as well as the | GNU License (GPL). However, even though the GPL allows linking GPLed code | (such as the GNU readline library package) with non-GPLed code (such as all | the rest of AFPL Ghostscript) if one doesn't distribute the result, the Free | Software Foundation, creators of the GPL, have told us that in their | opinion, the GPL forbids distributing non-GPLed code that is merely | <em>intended</em> to be linked with GPLed code. We understand that FSF | takes this position in order to prevent the construction of software that is | partly GPLed and partly not GPLed, even though the text of the GPL does not | actually forbid this (it only forbids <em>distribution</em> of such | software). We think that FSF's position is legally questionable and not in | the best interest of users, but we do not have the resources to challenge | it, especially since FSF's attorney apparently supports it. Therefore, even | though we added the user-contributed interface to GNU readline in internal | Aladdin Ghostscript version 5.71 and had it working in version 5.93 (one of | the last beta versions before the 6.0 release), we removed it from the | Aladdin Ghostscript 6.0 distribution. As I said, in view of this - an apparent belief that the GPL can bind code that bears no relation in copyright law anything GPLed - I would not trust anything the FSF might say about copyright and the GPL. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
