On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 01:14:27AM -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
A signature is not a creative work and as such not covered by copyright.
At the moment the only protection that the signature/key has is that of
a trade secret, the GPLv2 does not cover that type of intellectual
propery and does not grant the licensee access to trade secrets.
Show me any case law that indicates otherwise. Maybe the content
producers will at some point manage to establish that encryption keys
and signatures are somehow copyrightable, but until a court of law
makes that determination there is no kaboom here.
No, the license says that it does not address the right to run a
program, and states that the license does not impose restrictions.
That is quite different from saying that the right is unrestricted.
So again, not much of a kaboom here either.
I'm talking about the GPLv2, so it doesn't matter what the GPLv3 says
wrt. additional permissions. Even if GPLv2 and GPLv3 grant the same
freedoms (permissions), the collective work would have additional
restrictions because of the GPLv3 code and as such the combined work
would result in a sublicensing of the GPLv2 licensed code, which is
explicitly not permitted.
If they are the original author they can make that decision, just like
authors can dual-license, or decide to license their code as GPLv2+. It
is kind of funny how they phrase the exception as granting permission to
link against OpenSSL, where in reality they accept the added restriction
that results from the advertising clause of the BSD license. (i.e.
instead of granting you an additional freedom, they chose to remove the
freedom to modify the part of the code that advertises).
However with the openssl case there is no tight coupling because openssl
is a separate library. Some people have argued that the LGPL was never
really necessary because (unlike static libraries) shared libraries are
still separable from the GPL'd program.
Furthermore, those projects are not pulling individual source files from
into their project. There are also alternative crypto libraries (gnutls,
nessie) which can in many cases easily replace the openssl dependency.
Finally the original author accepts the additional restriction that
comes from the BSD + advertising clause, while the GPLv2 authors do not
accept the additional restrictions they would inherit from the GPLv3
otherwise they would re-license their code to GPLv2+.
Jan
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