Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: Copyright vs. Copyleft

[Alex Hudson]

On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 16:14 +0000, Lee Braiden wrote:
> > Software 'A' under the BSD licence is free for me because I get the 
> > freedom to change and redistribute the software; the four FSF freedoms 
> > are there. The fact that software 'B' which is derived from 'A' is not 
> > free software does not affect the freeness, for me.
> 
> But what I'm saying is, without copyright law, you DON'T have those 
> rights.

Copyright law doesn't give you those rights though. If you look at what
constitutes copyright, it's actually a set rights of restriction given
to authors. Free software licences voluntarily refuse to exercise those
rights of restriction.

> > Are you saying that you consider BSD-licensed software not to be
> > free software?
> 
> <snip> So, while individual versions might be free, the 
> "software", in it's wholistic sense, would not be.
> 
> But BSD was *your* topic, and that was not my question.  I was asking 
> why you feel that a BSD license is similar to the complete lack of 
> copyright.  If, indeed, it was you who suggested that; my modal email 
> client won't let me check :/  Wouldn't BSD just be released without any 
> rights at all, if that was the case?

Your statement was that free software cannot exist without copyright. I
gave my example of BSD licensing (ostensibly copyrighted software that
behaves as if it were not copyrighted, for the most part) to tease out
the fact that you actually don't believe BSD licenced software is free
software.

[Why do I believe BSD licenced software is similar to lack of copyright?
Because of the set of restrictions which copyright makes available, the
BSD licence enforces only one: that the author be correctly attributed.
In other countries, there may be other rights (moral rights) which do
not apply to software in this country. But, if copyright did not exist,
the only extra thing you would be able to do with BSD licenced software
would be to pretend that you authored it, which is not a discussion
relevant to the four FSF freedoms really]

While we can argue whether or not it's a good thing, I cannot discuss
with you whether or not copyright is required for free software: we do
not share the same definition of that term, so the discussion is
pointless. Your definition of free software is what the FSF would call
"copylefted" software, and yes, I think most people here would agree
that copyright is required to be able to copyleft software, which again
was the point Mark raised with you earlier.

Cheers,

Alex.