On Jun 17, 2007, Daniel Hazelton <dhazelton@enter.net> wrote:
You're mixing up spirit of license with intent of licensing (or
something else, I don't remember exactly the term I invented to try to
make this distinction clear)
The former is the intent of the FSF for writing the GPL.
The latter is the motivations of the copyright holder to license his
work under that license.
The FSF has no say on the latter. The copyright holders have no say
on the former.
When people claim the GPL changed its spirit, they're claiming the FSF
changed its intent.
It didn't.
Clear now?
If it doesn't allow you to run the software *because* of a designed-in
limitation on the freedom of the end-user, then it's a disrespect for
the freedom. I've never changed my position in this regard. Maybe I
wasn't clear, or you misunderstood, or the network corrupted the bits
in transit ;-)
tit for tat or each for oneself?
Not in the preamble, which discusses the spirit I'm talking about.
The preamble of GPLv3 is pretty much the same.
For this case. But it's not the case where I claimed it made a
difference.
And? How is this going to achieve more contributions in kind?
Dunno. Not much? I know I complain to hardware manufacturers that
ship broken BIOSes, to no avail. It doesn't look like they care, or
that it makes a difference.
And then, I'm not talking about a case in which the thing is broken
(in which case the user might have a real case)
Think of improvements I'd like to make, that I probably won't do
because the hardware won't let me run it. So you'll never see those
contributions I and all the other untivoized users could make, and you
won't ever know what you're missing.
If you say so, it must be right, in spite of all objective evidence,
eh? :-)
But still, somehow, that's not its spirit, you say. I don't get it.
Which shows you don't know what the spirit really is. It is, and it
has always been, what you agreed above that the GPL was about.
What others think the spirit is doesn't affect what the spirit is. It
just says what others think the spirit is, and how off the mark they
are in their assessment of the spirit of the license (= intent behind
its creation)
I guess this should be pretty obvious that I believe this, yes.
I don't know that I can make a general assertion about my believing
what the FSF says, but I don't remember having had reasons to
disbelieve it.
You're looking at the downside. Look at the upside: all the
contributions you'll get from users of formerly-tivoized platforms.
Being able to put their efforts to work in their own self-interest, on
their own hardware, they are likely to give more back "in kind" than
the vendor ever could.
And if the vendor doesn't go that way, what you lose are the limited
contributions of that vendor.
Big potential win, small potential loss. Sounds like a no-brainer to
me, really.
I can't make sense of what you're saying.
Are you disputing that tivoized binaries are non-Free Software?
What law could possibly support this claim?
So you say. I believe I have too. That we disagree doesn't mean any
of us is not being objective. It may mean we have different
backgrounds, we're talking past each other, we're not understanding
each other, and a number of other possibilities.
--
Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
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