Date: Tue, 16 May 2000 01:34:10 -0700 From: W Gerald Hicks <jhix@mindspring.com> To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why are people against GNU? WAS Re: 5.0 already? Message-ID: <39210802.4CA91E8A@mindspring.com> References: <Pine.BSF.3.96.1000516095957.5152P-100000@haldjas.folklore.ee>
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Narvi wrote: > > The GPL would be worthless if people could preface it with any clauses they > > wanted to that modified its terms in any way they wanted. The instructions > > for how to apply the GPL to your own code _IS_ the distribution agreement. > > It is the only document that grants you the right to distribute the GPL. > > > > This can't be true. If this were true, teh perl dual licence under GPL and > asrtistic would not be possible. > No, release under dual-license is a separate topic from that of modifications to GPL. It's unclear whether either of these topics would stand up in court anyway since at the moment only hypothetical situations exist. What is clear (to me at least) is that the BSD License has been tried by fire and was successful in relieving *BSD from the sanction that AT&T was seeking. For all the "expert" opinions we've seen regarding the GPL (ad nauseum) it has not to my knowledge been through the same degree of legal test in court as the BSDL. According to a recent Linux Journal article, several true legal experts have offered the opinion that it is too restrictive in some areas, too vague in others and even we non-experts can easily see that it is a twisted morass of confusing legalese. That's enough to make quite a significant crowd of developers reject it in favor of a much simpler and less vindictive (more free) license. Hitler. The Nazis. Mussolini too. Now, is this thread dead? -- Jerry Hicks jhix@mindspring.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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