Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: Freedom to take freedom

[MJ Ray]

Alex Hudson <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-01-24 at 10:59 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> > The need for imposing terms to mean changing terms rather than just
> > associating the term with the action is not at all clear to me.
>
> Well, given that the license is coming from the licensor rather than the
> licensee, I don't see what the licensee is doing which could be called
> "impose" in any meaningful way - they're just distributing a binary (or
> whatever). Is giving someone a copy of the software "imposing" it on
> them? They don't even need a license in order to receive and run the
> work really...

Giving someone a copy under the GPL+bits would be establishing those
terms as something to be complied with, so I think it has the meaning
of "impose", yes.

Maybe this is something else to ask address@hidden, but I'm not sure
whether they'll reply "use GPLv3" and I'd rather wait until they
answer the GPLv3 collection from address@hidden before asking
something else of marginal interest to me at present.

[...]
> Potentially, Red Hat have a different interpretation here which more
> closely follows what I'm arguing than yours. For example:
>       http://directory.fedoraproject.org/wiki/GPL_Exception_License_Text

Yuck.  Is there any additional term that Red Hat won't try to pass
off as an exception?

> By your reckoning, the last statement in that Exception (which I think
> we'd all agree _is_ an exception ;) is effectively a no-op.  [...]

I'm not sure about the legality of it, but removing the Exception when
you redistribute unmodified would be misleading others about the terms
on the work.

Regards,
-- 
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