On Jul 21, 2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Agreed that there is next to no chance for enforcement in such a case, > but does your reading of the GPL not indicate that non-GPL > distribution of copies of anything ever covered by its work-as-a-whole > provision is prohibited? Yep, my reading does not indicate that. As I've already tried to explain to you, the GPL doesn't take away any rights that you had before receiving the program, or even before accepting the license. So, if you have received a whole program under the GPL, and one of its files says: This file is in the public domain Then you can use it however you like, no matter what the GPL says, because the GPL can't bring the file out of the public domain. If the file says: Copyright 2008 John Doe You have permission to do whatever you like with this file, including running, reading, studying, modifying, distributing, publishing, selling, etc, as long as you retain the copyright notice and this license. then it doesn't matter that the GPL refrains from granting you permission to do certain things, you have that express permission straight from the copyright holder in the file itself, and the GPL will not take it away from you. To make sense of this in your twisted "GPL has restrictions" understanding, you could picture it as if each file was under a dual license: the GPL under which the whole is distributed, with its alleged restrictions, and the individual license applied to the file (or even to parts of files). To me it makes more sense to just take it as a sum of permissions: such and such license over such and such parts (or the whole) grant me permission to do such and such with those parts (or the whole); such and such license over such and such parts grant me permission to do such and such with those parts, etc. Free Software licenses, being pure copyright licenses, can't remove any rights, so this kind of reasoning has worked quite well for me. Of course, if you bring non-Free agreements into the picture, agreements that require explicit acceptance because they do remove certain rights you had before, then things get messier, and this simple sum of permissions approach won't work. > I don't see any escape clause. There isn't any for dual licensing either. But that's because other licenses and rights you might have are outside the scope of this one license; it only adds to the things you're entitled to do. That said, IANAL, so please don't take this as legal advice. -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} FSFLA Board Member ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
