I'll take the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone on this one.
On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 08:25:49PM +0200, Oliver Schneider wrote:
Quandary wrote:
2.c says that an *appropriate* copyright notice must be displayed. It does not define what appropriate means. It does *not* say, anywhere, that the copyright notice cannot be modified.
we as the copyright holders decide what's appropriate
See below...
Not only this. I believe that the meaning of this paragraph *implies* that the copyright information cannot be removed or replaced by anyone except the copyright holder(s). And if you come and add some code that you can add you copyright *without* removing other's copyright(s). But I am not a lawyer :o)
And that's my point exactly -- you'd need a lawyer to interpret that, and ultimately it's the judge who makes the final decision as to what the "real" interpretation or meaning is (at least it's that way in the US). The more legal precidence and explicit laws you can find to support an interpretation, the better chance you can convince a judge to take your point of view. Really, the lawyers job is to give you a best guess as to what he thinks he can convince that judge of -- but I for one lack the experience required to make such a guesstimate ;).
In any case, the basic premise still holds: until we can *prove* (or have a high chance of convincing a juge) that the copyright change isn't appropriate, it should be considered appropriate by default. Defaulting to saying it's inappropriate means that we could implicitly terminate any of these licenses even on suspicion (i.e., guilty until proven innocent), and that just doesn't make sense.
-- Travis
Always err on the side of caution
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Quandary wrote:
And that's my point exactly -- you'd need a lawyer to interpret that, and ultimately it's the judge who makes the final decision as to what the "real" interpretation or meaning is (at least it's that way in the US). The more legal precidence and explicit laws you can find to support an interpretation, the better chance you can convince a judge to take your point of view. Really, the lawyers job is to give you a best guess as to what he thinks he can convince that judge of -- but I for one lack the experience required to make such a guesstimate ;).
In any case, the basic premise still holds: until we can *prove* (or have a high chance of convincing a juge) that the copyright change isn't appropriate, it should be considered appropriate by default. Defaulting to saying it's inappropriate means that we could implicitly terminate any of these licenses even on suspicion (i.e., guilty until proven innocent), and that just doesn't make sense.
Sounds to me the most prudent course of action would be a new version of the GPL license which clarifies this particular bit of confusion.
Quandary wrote:
And that's my point exactly -- you'd need a lawyer to interpret that,
and ultimately it's the judge who makes the final decision
nope. In these matters, the copyright holder basically owns your ass. We can revoke all rights to anyone we please. Copyleft is just good manners, copyright is the law. Remember this already happened: a fork of OpenBSD was killed by license termination in response to copyright misrepresentation - and, boy, does it take a special brand of stupidity to manage to violate a BSD license
That said, the Hostilix people have no shame and no fear; they are well-known copyright violators (their WinuxOS was a repackaged Windows 2000, wasting SourceForge's bandwidth too) and are doing their best to alienate us; they are a bunch of loser punk posers who embarass the whole OS-development scene. Let them get away with it, they are do-no-good hacks and nothing can punish them worse than simply existing. Hostilix will die naturally from the complete lack of any form of skill on the part of the pathetic clowns who conceived it
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KJKHyperion -
Quandary -
Royce Mitchell III