Re: GPL, BSD and the FSF
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> According to de Raadt, Stallman disclaimed all knowledge of the episode. ("The FSF is not involved in this dispute."). However it seems Eben Moglen had knowledge of what was going on, and since Moglen is the right hand of Stallman, it is hard to credit Stallman not knowing the existence of the dispute.
I am not involved in 9/11. I have knowledge about it, as got anyone who lived through 2009, but I am not involved. Yet accordingly to this person line of thinking, I have knowledge and thus must be involved.
But lets not focus on conspiracies. Lets talk about copyright law, as in "by law, a new person doing small changes to an original work is not allowed to assert copyright".
The originality threshold is, by law, not defined as being either small or large. A small change can be original, while at the same time, a large change might not. US courts has for example said that it require a minimal degree of creativity, which a small hand written change to a large code base might have. On that same line of thinking, a big batch of changes coming from automatic tools might not qualify for copyright, since the author of those changes has not contributed any act of creativity. The law focus is not about size, a fact easy forgotten when talking about copyright law.
After those two, the ramblings gets into "GPL is evil, proprietary software is good". They should join the "Freeing slaves are evil, slavery is good" folks.
Stallman's statement 'The FSF is not involved in this dispute' (about the appropriation of BSD under GPL) might be interpreted as a statement of ignorance (I don't know what is going on) or as a disclaimer of involvement (I know what is going on, but the FSF is not involved). I find both interpretations to be straining the bounds of credibility and certainly Stallman knew after Theo wrote to him.
But this is not the important issue that the thread is focused on - which are the relations between BSD and GPL. Stallman defends the appropriation of BSD code under GPL (at great length) based on a faulty interpretation of law and that interpretation needs to be put right.
The analogy of any of this to 9/11 or slavery seems rather silly.
I also find it strains the bounds of credibility that someone accuses people of being involved when they has nothing to support the accusations. This is what the term conspiracy theory was created for, like "it must be aliens who did it" or "A shadow Government". Its nutjobs that talk to other nutjobs, creating their own reality in order to feel good about themselves.
RMS answer this speculation directly at: http://openbsd.7691.n7.nabble.com/Real-men-don-t-attack-stra...
But sure, lets talk to the real issue. BSD permit that changes to copyrighted work be placed under a different license. This explicit permission is why proprietary software developers like BSD/MIT licensed software, since they can do changes and then add a proprietary license to the then created derivate work. GPL do not permit this, and thus we have the difference between GPL and BSD. The question about what defines derivate work is originality, which the word "small" or "big" has no impact on. A small change to a large body of work has similar impact as a green change to a yellow body of work. Originality do not care about sizes, it cares about creativity (in the United States).
In the linked mailing list, there is also some discussion if an redistribution of a work can add a license without doing any changes at all, which is how the apple app store does it. Apple puts puts work that is under BSD, with no changes, and redistribute it in the app store under the terms of app store license. The legal view by most lawyer/apple/fsf and others is that apple is legally allowed to do so under BSD license, since the requirement for distribution has been followed by Apple. If there is a change in consensus regarding this, the proprietary software distributors would be the first to react and the small number of BSD work that get distributed under GPL, while still retaining the BSD notice, would be quite small in comparison.
The relevant part of the mailinglist discussion can be seen here: http://openbsd.7691.n7.nabble.com/Real-men-don-t-attack-stra...
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