Re: Stormy's Update: Week of December 7th
On Wed, 2009-12-16 at 16:08 -0700, Stormy Peters wrote: That said, the discussion started because of Clutter and its copyright assignment and the fact that that is blocking it's inclusion in GNOME 2.28. I'm not a lawyer, so I'm very ready for someone to just tell me that I'm wrong, but: Clutter's isn't a copyright assignment. It's a copyright waiver, placing the code in the public domain: http://bugzilla.openedhand.com/waiver.html My concern is that code without a copyright holder cannot really be under any license. For instance, nobody could go to court to defend abuse of LGPL code in Clutter: http://git.clutter-project.org/cgit.cgi?url=clutter/tree/COPYING if nobody owns the copyright in that code. I hope that issue can be addressed. Whether I want to assign copyright is a different matter for me. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Stormy's Update: Week of December 7th
(Sent via my phone; apologies for the formatting) To clarify: Clutter (currently) comes with a copyright assignment. The copyright waiver has been introduced for small patches attached to Bugzilla to avoid going through the copyright assignment process. The waiver and the assignment are two orthogonal approaches, and they should not be confused. I explained this in various venues - including at GCDS. We, in Intel, are currently working towards a solution but it will take some time (as usual, when lawyers are involved). Ciao, Emmanuele. On 17 Dec 2009 09:54, Murray Cumming murr...@murrayc.com wrote: On Wed, 2009-12-16 at 16:08 -0700, Stormy Peters wrote: That said, the discussion started because ... I'm not a lawyer, so I'm very ready for someone to just tell me that I'm wrong, but: Clutter's isn't a copyright assignment. It's a copyright waiver, placing the code in the public domain: http://bugzilla.openedhand.com/waiver.html My concern is that code without a copyright holder cannot really be under any license. For instance, nobody could go to court to defend abuse of LGPL code in Clutter: http://git.clutter-project.org/cgit.cgi?url=clutter/tree/COPYING if nobody owns the copyright in that code. I hope that issue can be addressed. Whether I want to assign copyright is a different matter for me. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-l...@gnome ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Private Foundation-List Petition for referendum
5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups I am being discriminated against because I can not make improvements or discuss where the project is headed. The definition of open source is a criterion for software licenses; I don't think it applies to mailing list usage at all. But I cannot speak for the Open Source Initiative. In the case of the Free Software Definition, I wrote it, so I can say this is a misinderstanding of it. The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. This freedom applies to any particular user. You have a freedom to make modified versions. This means that any discussions should be made public. I don't think that follows. The four freedoms state what a free software license must permit to any single user. It says nothing about how users that choose to work together ought to communicate or make their decisions. If project A has a public discussion list, and project B has a private one, they can both qualify as free software. How can I improve a program if I don't know where the project is headed and reasons why the project is headed in that direction (what are the goals of the project)? You can improve a program by making a copy and changing it. The point is that you are free to do this. You are not obliged to discuss it with anyone, get approval, etc. I think that you are talking about how to go about cooperating with others on a joint project. That's a different issue. A free software license gives people the freedom to organize a project to maintain their version of the program. A free software license does not say how they can or can't organize this project, so they can do it however they wish. If you want them to put your changes in their version, you need to work with their arrangements. But a free software license gives you the freedomt make and distribute your own modified version on your own. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Private Foundation-List Petition for referendum
To deny a group or a person the legitimacy to keep intellectual property proprietary goes against criteria five of the Open Source Definition: A statement that uses the term intellectual property is tremendously vague, since that refers to many laws at once, and treats them as one single issue. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html for more explanation of this. Thus, when you say intellectual property here, I need to ask what you are concretelt talking about. Program source code? Mailing list messages? Something else? I conclude that would the Free Software Foundation's (= your) ethics have been written down in the form of a license, that it wouldn't be compatible with the Open Source Definition at all. You're talking about the OSI's criteria for software licenses, The FSF does not agree with open source, so we don't try to follow any of the criteria of open source. We judge software licenses by the Free Software Definition. But it makes no sense to apply a license criterion to ethical views. The Free Software Definition criteria for licenses reflect our ethical views. We use them to judge software licenses, but judging other ethical questions is a different matter. You, however, as as head of the FSF, claim that proprietary software is illegitimate. Meaning that you say that it's 'unlawful' under FSF's ethical code. An ethical principle is not a license. A license is a legal requirement, and ethics are ideas of right and wrong. They are different; if you identify them the result is confusion. For instance, the ACLU calls Nazism unethical, and opposes censorship of Nazism. If you try to write down ethics as a license, you would transcribe the ACLU's ethical view Nazism is wrong into a nonexistent license requirement forbidding Nazism, and that would disagree squarely with the ACLU's real position. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Stormy's Update: Week of December 7th
Hi Murray, On Thu, 2009-12-17 at 10:54 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote: My concern is that code without a copyright holder cannot really be under any license. This is a very frequently made point; of course - IANAL. But if you follow this argument to it's logical conclusion this makes all of Xorg, gtk+, GNOME, Linux, Mozilla, Busybox, indefensible. If this were true: any form of license would be pretty pointless without aggregate ownership - right ? For instance, nobody could go to court to defend abuse of LGPL code in Clutter: http://git.clutter-project.org/cgit.cgi?url=clutter/tree/COPYING if nobody owns the copyright in that code. Sure, but of course - someone wrote the code once, and thus owns the copyright on at least some piece of it. Busybox's lack of assignment (it appears) hasn't appeared to stop the SFLC chasing GPL violators, sometimes a dozen at a time ;-) http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2009/dec/14/busybox-gpl-lawsuit/ HTH, Michael. -- michael.me...@novell.com , Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership
Hi to all. I'm not a GNOME Foundation member, then I apologize for this e-mail. But as enthusiastic GNOME user, I would like to send you my opinion. First at all: thank you Richard Stallman and Miguel De Icaza for GNOME idea. Thank you Miguel for GNOME hacking and for Mono too. Thank you RMS for GCC, Emacs and other packages of GNU system. Especially thanks to all GNOME hackers to improve GNOME every day. If some of you use/develop/love some proprietary software, this not matter. Thank you for your free code in GNOME. As user, my vision is that free software is a competitor of non-free software. It is simple for me: free software was born to replace proprietary software. Not only GNU/Linux is a competitor of Mac OS X and Windows, but all FLOSS are a competitor of its proprietary counterparts. I.e.: Firefox is a competitor of IE and Safari (and Chrome, that is partially non-free). GCC is a competitor of proprietary compilers (and GCC won :-) ). GNOME was born as a competitor of KDE because it was based on a proprietary framework. Today GNOME and KDE are friends and both free/open source. So the Free/Open Source Software is - taking it as a whole - a competitor of proprietary software. You may be not in agree with me, but many users see the issue in these terms. They would like to have free/open tools to replace proprietary tools. They feel free/open source software as a proprietary software alternative/competitor/replacement. I often read msdn blogs, google blogs, and other corporate and community blogs and planets. I never read on msdn something to legitimate Mac. Oh yes, you can read about MS Office for Mac, but it is different. You can read on GNU website about GNU software for Windows or Mac too. For GNU Project it is better to use Octave on Windows instead Matlab on Windows. If floss is a non-floss competitor then it is logic do not advertise or speaking favorably about non-free software in the GNOME Planet. Obviously, it is good to analyze proprietary software and learn from it. IMHO GNOME brings the better ideas from Windows an Mac, and it is better than Mac and Windows. But GNOME, on top of a free/open OS, is a replacement of Windows and Mac. And I think that GNOME should advertise its brothers in virtualization software, like QEMU and Virtualbox[1], not vmWare. Then I think RMS suggestion is essentially logic and coherent with GNOME mission and with what users expect from it. Thank you and best regards. Guido http://guiodic.wordpress.com [1] it is distributed as free software too. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
