Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
I've seen the question about separating out the non-license commentary posed (on the FSB mailing list IIRC) and answered by Richard Stallman. Richard considers the preamble and other commentary about the philosophy of the GPL to be an essential part of the license. I don't think he would accept a GPL stripped of its advocacy role, even if aggregated into a COPYING file that also contained an appropriate polemic.
I think that's a misreading. I think there's actually a theory of jurisprudence behind the inclusion of the preamble (and a good theory, at that). Basically, a clear *intent* is essential to judging a contract in all but the very least ambiguous aspects. This contract has to be interpreted across a lot of jurisdictions. What you call the "polemic" is pretty vital. -t
I mean, really, can you see Richard adopting language like that in Larry Rosen's Open Software License or a Creative Commons ShareAlike License for the GPLv4? :-) _______________________________________________ Gnu-arch-users mailing list Gnu-arch-users@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-arch-users GNU arch home page: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnu-arch/
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