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Date:      Sun, 7 Apr 2002 12:12:24 +0200
From:      Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr>
To:        Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
Cc:        Ian Pulsford <ianjp@optusnet.com.au>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Abuses of the BSD license?
Message-ID:  <20020407101223.GA4647@lpt.ens.fr>
In-Reply-To: <3CB01A09.C86F98FC@mindspring.com>
References:  <3CAE7037.801FB15F@optusnet.com.au> <3CAEA028.186ED53E@optusnet.com.au> <20020406105111.A90057@lpt.ens.fr> <3CAEDDD2.2ADA819F@mindspring.com> <20020406114505.GA2576@lpt.ens.fr> <3CAEE4A1.315CF53@mindspring.com> <20020406191209.GA3203@lpt.ens.fr> <3CAF8204.5E93CE38@mindspring.com> <20020407084801.GA4429@lpt.ens.fr> <3CB01A09.C86F98FC@mindspring.com>

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Terry Lambert said on Apr  7, 2002 at 03:06:01:
> 
> > That looks, to me, like effectively dropping the BSD licence terms,
> > since you don't know what they apply to; sure you can find out with
> > some research, but you could have done that anyway, given just a BSD
> > copyright notice and no licence.  And when redistributing, you can
> > just continue to bundle the BSD licence, now made meaningless by this
> > "we're not telling you what pieces" disclaimer.
> 
> Wrong.  Without explicit delineation of what it applies to,
> you must assume it applies to everything, not that it applies
> to nothing -- else why would it be there at all?

That was precisely my point with respect to Microsoft: without
explicit delineation, how do they (a) include the BSD licence,
(b) not imply that it applies to everything they're shipping?

To quote from your earlier mail: I wrote

> > For your own protection, if you're Microsoft you must make it
> > explicitly clear exactly what the BSD licence applies to -- it
> > clearly applies to something you're shipping; and surely you can't
> > say "this licence applies to some code in our ftp binary, but not
> > to the binary as a whole, and if you want to know exactly what it
> > applies to and thus take advantage of this licence, you have to go
> > find the relevant pieces of source code for yourself; we won't
> > help you."

To which you wrote:
 
> Sure they can say that.  Why couldn't they?

Well, can they or can't they?  If they can, why can't the GNU folks?

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