[Discuss] OSS licenses (was Home NAS redux)

John Abreau abreauj at gmail.com
Thu Jan 10 02:01:27 EST 2013


That's a great series of arguments. Describe a bunch of things that the GPL
doesn't do, assert that the GPL *should* do those things, and use that
assertion to support an argument that GPL is "less free".

This latest rant is decidedly less interesting than the recent Gnome 3
rant.



On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 10:45 PM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu)
<blu at nedharvey.com>wrote:

> > Media boundaries, as well as file boundaries, are meaningless.  In fact,
> they
> > are one and the same.
>
> Gawd, I can't believe there's still MORE to say about this.  Beating a
> dead horse, about the total complete insignificance of file and media
> boundaries.
>
> Now how about if I store something in Amazon S3.  They don't provide a
> filesystem; just an abstracted serial data store accessible through an API.
>  So if I write a GPL binary there, and follow it with a non-GPL binary, I
> haven't combined them into a file.  If I tell you to download blocks A,
> I've only distributed the GPL product, not the other product.  If I tell
> you to download blocks B, I've only distributed the other product, not the
> GPL product.  But if I tell you to download blocks A and B, then have I
> combined those things into a single derived work?
>
> What if I merely tell you, "Block A is the GPL product, and Block B is the
> non-GPL product."  And I leave the decision up to you, to choose if you're
> going to download neither, one or the other, or both.
>
> What if I tell you, "The URL for a GPL product is ___ and the URL for a
> non-GPL product is ____"
>
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>



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John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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