In saying this IANAL, however, I have been using English every day of my
life since I started talking well over forty years ago.
{ ;-) Some would say I was rambling but that is another matter. }
The fact is that if you really feel that you was some kind of definitive
answer you need to ask the right question* of Sun. Neither Brian nor
for that matter myself are unhappy with the interpretation. We have
discussed this in one of our many phone calls.
The question as far as we are both concerned is answered, questioning
the answer is not a bad thing. However questioning the answer without
sufficient argument is not going to get anyone to rethink a position.
gNewSense has as a project since Brian and I met up to first discuss it
on ICT Expo in the RDS in Dublin Friday 4th May 2006 (nearly two years
ago now), made huge strides, this should not be a sticking point.
A correctly formulated question to be asked of Sun would be:
Providing that people give suitable attribution and include your
licence, do you prohibit the use of your Sun RPC code complete or in
part in other peoples works?
My personal answer:
Does their licence prohibit such use, not that I can see.
I do this by writing out the four freedoms and read the licence to see
if it offends any of them.
We are not Debian and use the GDFL which Debian would not, however we do
lock out that which is referred to as the advertising clause.
Finally to end this on a slightly upbeat note when dealing with thing
like this please remember:
The English language is broken and I can't find its bug tracking system
to file a bug against it! It appears they keep applying patches and fail
to fix the core problem. The problem is made worse Upstream just does
not want to know. ;-)
Latin developers stopped working on it a couple of thousand years ago -
they won't even talk about their work!