Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Two question which I have to pass on

[Noah Slater]

On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 06:07:23PM -0600, Karl Berry wrote:
>     Who would be the right person to convince?
>
> I don't know if you wrote rms yet.  But I belatedly realized that it's
> not really a matter of "convincing".  It's a matter of the law.  All the
> other arguments are beside the point.

Nope, I didn't write to him.

> Without a legal foundation, it's pretty much pointless to discuss it,
> because (I am virtually certain) what rms will say (after a delay) is
> "ask the lawyers", and what the lawyers will say (after a much longer
> delay) is "the law says it's best to keep the years separate".  At least
> this is what happened the last time we went around this loop, and
> nothing has changed since.  And rms and the lawyers have other things to
> do with their time than go around again ...

Of course, my argument is only based on common sense. It is intended to serve as
the justification for asking a lawyer for feedback. However, there might be a
slight confusion here. I'm not arguing for using date ranges, I am arguing for
only including a single year. I believe that this is all that is necessary.

Is there a legal contact we could ask? I know Debian and Apache both have a
mailing list devoted for questions like this, but I suspect that the FSF has a
couple of lawyers who work with them privately.

I wouldn't want this to be some massive affair, with things going back and forth
and people wasting time on it. It's a really a very trivial matter. However, it
would be nice if we could compose an argument and send it to one of the lawyers
for a quick response, even if that turns out to be a prima facie rejection.

Thanks,

-- 
Noah Slater, http://tumbolia.org/nslater