In article <[email protected]>, David Kastrup <[email protected]> wrote: > What is covered is a matter of copyright law. Which is the case with > any software license or contract. Getting copyright law right is hard > and a moving overly complex target, different in different countries. > > But that's hardly a fault with the GPL, let alone the FSF.
Exactly--and that's why the very first question to be asked when considering whether you can or cannot do something with a given blob of GPL code is *not* "what does GPL say?", but rather "does it matter what GPL says?". That's also the very first question to ask when dealing with non-GPL code, whether it is under a pure copyright license, or a contract (assuming GPL is not a contract). In fact, that's also the first question to ask when dealing with a contract that has nothing to do with code--one of the first lessons in my contracts class in law school was to make sure the contract applies before you spend a lot of time analyzing the details of the contract. Many a contract professor has put a problem on their final exam with a complex contract and a fact pattern that doesn't actually fall under the contract, and many a student has wasted a lot of valuable time writing up a long analysis of that contract, instead of writing the correct answer: "the contract is not applicable". -- --Tim Smith _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
