Re: [gNewSense-users] Possible problem with closed bug 123

[Paul O'Malley]

hi Sam,


With reference to:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=424957

Please read the last part by Colin Watson, I agree with him. We now have 
several ways to read it as Free.

What Sun's aim was in this matter seems to have been was that a person 
would not release work downstream and claim it was Sun's, or derived 
from Sun.

My paraphrasing of what Sun is saying goes as follows - "you may use our 
work, BUT you _must_ call it your work and cite us as source". That is 
standard copyright attribution. It is a real pity that the words that 
Sun used are convoluted enough to cause confusion for some people.
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!

Regards,

Paul