Joerg Schilling wrote:
Neil Bothwick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:16:33 +0200, Joerg Schilling wrote:
If you repeat the "opinion" of other people, you make it _your_ opinion
and if your opinion may harm other people, you are not allowed to
publish it unless you are able to definitely prove it!
There is a difference between repeating and reporting. Reporting the
opinions of others is legal in most Western countries, with certain,
usually reasonable, constraints.
Sorry, you missunderstand this at an important point:
You are not allowed to "report" other opinions if they are known to be be wrong.
Please be careful not to apply the legal free
speech/publication standards of your country to the rest of
the world. In the USA, for example, it is most certainly
legal to publish known-false opinions as long as you clearly
label them as opinion, not fact. Our presidential campains
would be much nicer if it *was* illegal, but it is not.
You have thrown out the words "slander" and "defamation" at
least once. Again, I only know first-hand about the USA,
but here, nothing I've seen so far would even come close to
legally actionable slander. Even making factually incorrect
statements of *fact* can be protected speech, to the extent
that the person making the statements believes them to be
true. And, conspiracy theories aside, I highly doubt the
people making the claims about licensing issues honestly
believe them to be false. There is certainly enough complex
legal technicalities with cross-licensing issues to raise a
genuine issue of good-faith belief in such claims.
The reality, regardless of what Debian, or the FSF, or you,
or any lawyers say, is that the licensing issue has not been
tested in court yet. Unless and until that happens, the
whole debate is pure theory. Debian is clearly not willing
to take the risk of being sued by someone for violating
their copyright. If Debian is willing to settle for a far
inferior product just to avoid that risk, that's their right
as distributors. You have made it abundantly clear that you
disagree with their position, so there is not much else to do.
--K
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