This is the mail archive of the cygwin-talk mailing list for the cygwin project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: Rsync over ssh (pulling from Cygwin to Linux) stalls..


Dave Korn wrote:
On 14 August 2006 20:48, mwoehlke wrote:
Dave Korn wrote:
On 14 August 2006 18:41, mwoehlke wrote:
Dave Korn wrote:
On 14 August 2006 17:04, mwoehlke wrote:
My understanding is that if you place it in Public Domain, then anyone
can do anything with it and no one can stop this. IOW RedHat would be
safe because no one can prevent them from using Public Domain material
in any manner or fashion.
  That's not what "safe" means.  If the program is in the public domain,
rather than RH having the copyright assigned to them, then anyone could
take it, make a proprietary version and distribute it without the
sources, and RH would not be in a legal position to enforce the GPL on
it because they would not be the copyright holder.
And the problem with this would be what, exactly? "Safe" in that no one
can take legal action against RH because of their use of it.
  No, redhat is "safe" in /that/ sense automatically, because the code is
GPLd and so they and everyone else in the world can do what they like with
it, and nobody can stop them.  The meaning of "safe" for redhat would be
"safe from anyone stealing it for proprietary use", because the code would
not be safe against that unless someone who can afford lawyers - such as
RH - holds the copyright.
...I think this is what Daryl is taking issue with: you are essentially
*forcing* GPL onto someone. Not everyone agrees with that philosophy (in
my case, it depends on my mood :-)).

It's not forced onto anyone.

Sure it is. "Use GPL, or you can't contribute to this software". It's very intentional coercion, and in all honesty the FSF has good reasons to do it, but that doesn't change the fact that it is a very high-handed approach.


On further research, the FSF has already addressed this question:
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html

According to that, Daryl has every right to make his code public domain, or for that matter release it under any other GPL-compatible license. Checking http://cygwin.com/licensing.html, I see where that could be a problem (because RH offers a "commercial" license) for another OSS license, but that should not apply to public domain work for exactly the reasons *you* pointed out.

So... are we just disagreeing over "safe", or are you actually telling me that RH (and thus Cygwin) would *refuse* to incorporate public domain code?

The irony of course is that the availability of a commercial license makes it look like Daryl's fears are in fact very well founded. :-)

--
Matthew
Only Joe suffers from schizophrenia. The rest of us enjoy it.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]