On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 06:07:23PM -0600, Karl Berry wrote: > Who would be the right person to convince? > > I don't know if you wrote rms yet. But I belatedly realized that it's > not really a matter of "convincing". It's a matter of the law. All the > other arguments are beside the point.
Nope, I didn't write to him. > Without a legal foundation, it's pretty much pointless to discuss it, > because (I am virtually certain) what rms will say (after a delay) is > "ask the lawyers", and what the lawyers will say (after a much longer > delay) is "the law says it's best to keep the years separate". At least > this is what happened the last time we went around this loop, and > nothing has changed since. And rms and the lawyers have other things to > do with their time than go around again ... Of course, my argument is only based on common sense. It is intended to serve as the justification for asking a lawyer for feedback. However, there might be a slight confusion here. I'm not arguing for using date ranges, I am arguing for only including a single year. I believe that this is all that is necessary. Is there a legal contact we could ask? I know Debian and Apache both have a mailing list devoted for questions like this, but I suspect that the FSF has a couple of lawyers who work with them privately. I wouldn't want this to be some massive affair, with things going back and forth and people wasting time on it. It's a really a very trivial matter. However, it would be nice if we could compose an argument and send it to one of the lawyers for a quick response, even if that turns out to be a prima facie rejection. Thanks, -- Noah Slater, http://tumbolia.org/nslater
